Second Chances

by Phelps, K. L.

  "No, not yet. I am not comfortable sitting here. I am not comfortable being here at all. I want to keep moving."

  "We jumped through all your hoops already. You still think we are being followed or tracked?" Nathan asked.

  "Yes, I know it sounds paranoid, but you don't know who we are dealing with. I need to be paranoid," Julie said. "I think I am going to need to be paranoid for the rest of my life."

  Nathan could hear the sadness in her voice and he honestly felt sorry for her. She looked tired, borderline exhausted. He didn't know what this woman had been going through or how long she had been going through it, but it was quite clear she was on edge.

  "So what do you want from us?"

  Julie looked at Paige and considered her question. She could see confusion in the girl's face and hear the desperation in her voice. She could see the same look in Jason and she had to fight her urge to breakdown in tears.

  "I'm sorry, Paige. You've no clue the danger we are in. I am just not comfortable staying in one place, not here anyway. By this time, my original plan had Jason and I a very long way away from here."

  "Well I need to know what the hell is going on," Paige said, looking from Julie to Jason. "A few days ago I thought I knew everything about myself and my past, but that was all a lie. I...I died, maybe? I remember my father dying, but..." She gestured at Jason. "I see that I am wrong about that too. Is anything I think I know real?"

  Her voice was cracking, she was on the verge of completely losing it. Nathan went to her and put his arms around her, doing his best to comfort her.

  "Okay, you don't want to stay in one place too long, then let's get out of here. We can take my car or yours, whichever. We can drive wherever you want and while we do, you can explain all this. Deal?"

  All eyes were on Julie, even Jason's. His most of all, actually. They seemed to be pleading with her. Nathan got the impression that he needed this even more than Paige.

  "You didn't have us jump through all those hoops just to let Paige see her father and then leave us high and dry, did you?"

  Julie swore under her breath. "No, I guess not. Jason, are you up for more time in the car?"

  He shook his head yes.

  "Okay, can you help him to the car? He's getting his muscle strength back, but he is still hurting more then he will let on."

  "Getting his strength back from what?" Paige asked, concern clearly showing on her face.

  "Later, once we are on the way."

  Julie did a quick sweep of the room, looking for anything that might indicate that they had been there. Nathan helped Jason to his feet and could tell Julie was right, the man was leaning heavily on him. Paige reached out a hand to help, but hesitated. Jason smiled weakly at her and after a moment she returned his smile.

  "My car or yours?" Nathan asked.

  Julie joined them outside and indicated her vehicle. "You don't mind driving, do you?"

  The way she voiced the question, Nathan knew he really had no choice. He was also certain that she would likely have her hand on or near her gun the entire time.

  He helped to buckle Jason into the backseat, Paige sitting with him and then he climbed in behind the wheel. Julie joined him in the front and sure enough her hand rested half in and half out of her purse. He looked at her hand and then at her.

  "I'm not going to apologize."

  He could hear the stress in her voice and wondered just how much trouble were they actually in.

  "Where to?"

  "Doesn't matter I guess. Just make sure you stick to the speed limit and follow the rules of the road."

  He nodded at Julie's instructions and started the car. He pulled out of the lot and turned right on a course that would take them to the Newport Bridge.

  "So," Julie said. "Where should I start?"

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE

  Silence hung in the car. Nathan flicked his eyes to the rearview mirror and saw that both Paige and her father seemed dazed. He wondered why the old man seemed almost as confused as Paige.

  "I'm not Paige, am I?"

  Jason reached over and took her hand and squeezed it, before looking at Julie. He seemed as eager to hear the answer as Paige.

  "You are and you aren't."

  "What does ..."

  "Why does he seem confused about all this?" Nathan interrupted.

  "That is all part of the story. He knew all of it at one time," Julie said reaching back and taking his hand from Paige. "To protect me, he gave up so much of himself."

  "Start from the beginning," Jason said softly. "I'll help as best I can."

  "No, please tell me who I am first. Whose memories do I have? They obviously aren't right. I clearly remember you dying. But I...or Paige, whoever is the one who actually died."

  Her voice was cracking again and Nathan had to fight the urge to stop the car and try to comfort her.

  "You are Paige Kendall, just not the original one."

  "What are you saying. I am some kind of copy? Some kind of clone or something?"

  "Yes, that is exactly what I am saying."

  Nathan wanted to laugh at Julie's words, but he'd seen too much these past few days to even consider her to be joking. "How is that possible?"

  "How do I have her memories? Well some of her memories? How do I ..."

  "Wait. Like Jason said, let me start at the beginning."

  "But," Paige began to protest.

  "No, let her tell the story," Jason insisted.

  "Your memories are a mix of the original Paige's and a fantasy that Jason helped make up."

  "I don't understand why..."

  "I'm going to explain," Julie said, her impatience sounding clearly in her voice.

  "Go ahead," Nathan urged.

  "Okay. The memories you have of your father and mother are fake. Your mother was a scientist like Jason. They were both neurologists. Well Jason was so much more, but..." She waved her hand, dismissing the thought.

  "Is my mother...Paige's mother still alive too?"

  "No," Julie said softly. "The memory you have of her death is real. She died when you...Paige was younger."

  Paige's eyes flicked to Jason and she could see the sadness in his face.

  "Paige became his world. I eventually wormed my way in," she said was a sad smile.

  "I don't understand."

  "I fell in love with your father when I was taking one of his courses."

  "Courses?"

  "I am not doing a very good job of explaining things, am I?"

  "I taught a few courses at...Harvard," Jason said, looking at Julie for confirmation. She nodded. "Julie was one of my students. Later she became one of my research assistants. And later we became closer."

  "I was in love with your father from the day I met him. Took me forever to let him know, but I won't bore you with that story."

  "Cloning? Was that the type of research you did?" Nathan asked.

  "No, Alzheimer's," Julie answered. "Like I said, the brain was his area of expertise. He was trying to understand the disease and come up with a cure. To say he was on the cutting edge would be like saying the guy who made the stealth bomber was on the cutting edge of paper airplane technology."

  "What do you mean?"

  Both Paige and Jason remained quiet, leaning forward a little, anticipating the answer.

  "I won't pretend to say I understand a quarter of what Jason does or did. None of us do, even after all this time. Memories are stored chemically, proteins encoded in the brain. Well Jason developed a way to scan, map, record and transfer those memories."

  "To what end? I mean how would that help Alzheimer victims?"

  "Understanding how something works is one of the first steps to knowing how to fix it. If this car broke down, could you fix it? Could you diagnose what was wrong with it?"

  "No."

  "Neither could I. But a mechanic could. A mechanic knows how a car engine works. He knows what each part is and what they are supposed to do. Jason was seeing how the brain and me
mory, specifically, worked. The stuff he developed was incredible. He started small. As with almost all research, it started with mice."

  "Mice?"

  "Yes, I am sure you've heard of training mice to run a complex maze. Well he would train a mouse to learn a maze, then he used his techniques to transfer that knowledge from that mouse to another mouse that had never seen the maze."

  "I remember those experiments," Jason said, a sad smile on his face. Nathan guessed there was much he did not remember.

  "Does he have Alz..."

  "No. Not real Alzheimer's," Julie insisted. "I will get to that. I wasn't his assistant at the time he was doing those experiments. Most of this I learned later from Jason and from reading his notes. Most of which, I will be honest, I couldn't come close to understanding."

  "So what happened?" Paige asked.

  "You did. Paige did. The fire. It was clear that there was no way Paige was going to recover from the fire. Jason refused to let her go. During her final days, he scanned her six ways from Sunday. Did every test he could imagine and recorded her memories. At the time I don't know what he thought he might do with them, but he couldn't let go and so he preserved her the only way he knew how."

  "I couldn't just let her go," Jason whispered. "I didn't have a real plan. I was completely lost until Bill called."

  "Bill?" Paige asked.

  "Your godfather, William Dillinger. He was my college roommate. I hadn't talked to him in years. I went on to medical school while he went to work for the government. We kept in touch, but not as often as I would have liked. His work was apparently very hush hush. He adored you though."

  Julie looked at Jason, with a smile on her lips. "You are remembering more and more, aren't you?"

  He nodded.

  "Then the damage may not be permanent."

  "What damage?"

  Jason ignored Nathan's question. "He adored you. He called the day after Paige died, I could tell he'd been crying. He told me he might be able to help. He said he knew about my research and wanted me to meet with...with..."

  "Doctor Rosenthal," Julie said.

  "Yes, Rosenthal. He said our research might compliment each others. With Bill's prodding I left my old life behind and joined a government research project and went to work with Rosenthal."

  "What did he do?" Nathan asked.

  "He was the cloning expert. He'd been working on cloning for quite some time. Wherever you think cloning technology is at, you'd likely be wrong. He'd been working on cloning organs. Think of it, you need a kidney replaced, clone a new one using your own genetic material. No chance of rejection because it is already you."

  Julie wiped absently at the tears at the corners of her eyes. Watching Jason recount the story, as painful as it was for him, filled her with hope.

  "They can clone single organs?" Paige asked, astonished.

  "No, well maybe now they can. I don't know. But that was what Rosenthal was working on back then, but couldn't get it to work. He moved on to cloning entire beings, which worked. Sort of. He could clone a person almost exactly. And we aren't talking embryos, but fully developed beings. I won't even pretend to say I understood any of it. I suppose in a way it was almost the same as what I was doing with copying the brain. Anyway, he could grow an entire person, but they always died."

  Before either Nathan or Paige could ask a question, Jason said. "It was the brain factor. He could clone and grow an exact physical duplicate, but the brain is a huge part of what keeps a person alive. Say what you will, but the will to live exists and it exists in a functioning mind. His clones lacked that. He could grow an exact duplicate, but the brain growing in that body didn't possess the knowledge or have the will that a person develops over their lifetime. His clones, they were just shells really, empty husks. For whatever reason, his cloning process was not able to clone the memories of a person. That is what I was able to provide. Kind of."

  "Kind of?" Nathan asked.

  "For Paige," Julie said. "The detailed scans he had from her. They worked on her for a very long time. It took them three years, but they did it. They made a clone and via trial and error they were able to map the memories he had saved onto that clone."

  Nathan slammed on the breaks. He'd been so engrossed in the story he hadn't noticed the street light turn to red until the last second. Julie slammed into the dashboard, while both Jason and Paige were restrained roughly by their seatbelts.

  A horn blared at them from the blue Honda Civic that zoomed in front of them.

  "Sorry, are you okay?"

  Julie rubbed her right arm and grimaced. "Should have been wearing my seatbelt."

  "Sweetheart..."

  "I'm okay, Jason."

  "Are you sure?"

  She nodded. The light turned green and Nathan eased off the brake. Julie slipped her seatbelt on.

  "So it worked?" Paige asked.

  "Yes and no. Or rather yes, but too well," Jason responded.

  "What does that mean?" Nathan asked, afraid at what the answer might be.

  "The memories. She had them all."

  Paige's brow wrinkled in confusion.

  "All of them," Jason stressed. "I took the scans after the fire. She remembered everything. She remembered being nearly burned to death. We tried everything to get her to deal with it. Hypnosis, therapy, you name it. In the end she couldn't deal with it. It was too much."

  "She killed herself," Nathan said softly.

  Jason nodded.

  "Those articles on the website you sent us to. You tried again and again, didn't you?"

  Paige gasped. "They all killed themselves? I'm going to..."

  "No," Jason said forcefully. "No. The first Paige did. She couldn't handle the memories. I was ready to give up after that. I had lost my daughter twice, I didn't think I could handle anymore. But a new manager joined our project and he somehow convinced me to stay on and give it another try. He was very charismatic and he brought in new people to the project that he insisted could help. His name was Cameron Kassar. It was his notion to manipulate Paige's memories. So after another couple of years or so Paige was alive again. We'd developed a new life for her. I thought it best to erase myself..."

  "You what? You thought it was best for me to think you were dead?"

  Tears ran down Jason's face. The venom of Paige's word stung harder than any physical blow she could have landed.

  "For myself. Best for myself. I am sorry. I couldn't handle it again. I intended to watch from afar. Paige would be alive again and that would be enough for me. I am sorry, but I was too weak to go through it again. I see how stupid that is now. I saved myself nothing and it only served Kassar's agenda. Heck, I think it might even have been his idea."

  "What happened?" Nathan prodded.

  "It worked. Seemed like it worked perfectly, anyway. Paige was alive and all seemed well. Cameron had used some of his other experts to sculpt Paige's memories."

  "Sculpt?"

  "Yes, they used a variety of techniques to alter Paige's memories until she had a bit of fantasy mixed in with the facts."

  "But she killed herself as well?"

  Jason nodded to Paige.

  "So it didn't work," Nathan said.

  "I...I guess not." Jason frowned and rubbed his chin.

  "No, it did. She didn't kill herself willingly."

  "What?" all three of them asked Julie.

  Julie looked at Jason and saw the confusion in his eyes.

  "So, you still haven't remembered it all."

  He shook his head. She reached out and took his hand again.

  "Paige, was...well murdered I guess is the best way to say it. It was Cameron. His aim for Jason's project was radically different from what he originally stated it was."

  "What was the original aim?" Nathan asked.

  "Well, like Jason said, it was ability to clone organs for people who needed transplants, but that didn't work out. The full person cloning though, that really got the government's interest. Think about
being able to clone the president if need be. Fear of assassination becomes a thing of the past. What if there was another Einstein? You'd never have to lose his brilliance, you could keep transferring his intellect into a new body when the current one wore out."

  "Monstrous," Jason said with a shudder.

  "Monstrous? But you were the one doing it," Nathan insisted.

  "I was trying to save my daughter...I"

  "Don't judge him," Julie said harshly. "Until you've experienced his loss, don't you..."

  Nathan held up a hand in surrender. He nodded. He thought about how he felt after Paige had died. He'd have done anything to get her back.

  "But that wasn't what this Cameron guy was doing, was it?" Paige asked.

  "What was he trying to do?" Jason asked to himself as much as to Julie. His brow was furrowed in deep thought. He knew the information was locked somewhere in his mind, but he couldn't access it.

  "It was a long time before I learned this, but he really wanted to swap people out in society. He originally was hoping Rosenthal would be able to increase the speed of his cloning process. However, as much as Rosenthal tried, it was never going to be as fast as Cameron wanted."

  "Wait, what do you mean swap people out?" Nathan asked.

  "Okay, imagine this. You have a big world meeting or summit. During the days of that meeting you snag a world leader and replace him with a clone. You now have control of that person. He or she is an exact copy, has all the memories, yet will follow your commands."

  "You are talking about some type of a Manchurian Candidate scenario," Jason said.

  "Yes, but it didn't work. Rosenthal couldn't speed the cloning process to anything even remotely close to what would be needed. And you either couldn't or wouldn't duplicate the process of mapping and transferring memories on other people."

  "I'm not following," Nathan said and Paige nodded in agreement.

  "Cameron wanted to be able to grab a person and over the course of say a weekend, replace them with his puppet. An exact duplicate but with embedded commands that would allow him to steer the person's actions. But the cloning process, as quickly as it was, was still way too slow and no one could figure out how Jason managed to record memories. Even working with all of his notes, no one could figure out the initial mapping process. There were parts of the process that only Jason knew, that he kept to himself. Paige had been the only person he'd ever done a complete scan on. Paige's memories were the only ones they could get to transfer and take. Once Jason discovered what he had done with the second Paige clone, he refused to be a part of the project anymore."