by S J Taylor
“Ready?” he asked me.
“Uh… yes. Yes,” I said a little louder, catching on to the fact that the room would most certainly be wired for sound. Of course he could hear every word I said.
“Opening stasis pod fifty-fix.” His voice was calm and emotionless, like he did this every day. Me, on the other hand… I could hardly catch my breath. Excitement. Nerves. Anxiety.
This was it.
With a hiss of steam from the vents near the narrow top of the pod, all the lights on fifty-six’s panel turned green and the front of it popped forward, toward me. I stumbled back a few steps, drawing the stun pistol from the back of my waistline. I may as well have been holding a slingshot and aiming to take down a HoverHawk. But it was all I had.
The front of the pod split in two segments with a straight line up its middle, folding around to the sides with loud mechanical whirring. It echoed off the distant walls of the chamber and came back to my ears as I waited for the billowing steam created by the clashing temperatures inside and out to dissipate and give me a look at what was inside…
A thick, purplish liquid spilled over the bottom edge of the pod and pooled toward my boots.
The pod was empty except for that sludge. Whatever experiment the Society had been keeping in there was long dead and returned to the primordial goo it had originated from.
Yuck.
“Uh, Jadran,” I called out, not sure where the microphones were. “Let’s move on to pod number eighty-one.”
“Yes,” his electronically reproduced voice answered me. “I think you are right.”
I stepped around the puddle of whatever had once been inside the pod, to the one standing behind it. I swallowed, looking down at the mess. What had that been, once upon a time?
“Opening pod eighty-one,” Jadran told me.
This time, I intentionally stood as far back into the aisle between the pods as I could.
Hellfire. If every single experiment in here was ruined, then what was I going to show the world? The Society had already admitted to doing genetic experiments. Except, in their version, they experimented with ways to heal the world after the three rogue nations had unleashed nuclear fire on an unsuspecting civilian populace.
Lies, lies, and more lies.
In history books, the victors get to tell the stories.
I tightened my hand around the grip of the bulky stun pistol. I’d be ready for whatever came out of pod eighty-one. Mutant demon monster, or cyborg soldier, or something else entirely, with long green tentacles and three gaping mouths in a blubbery chest.
Yeah, okay, fine. I was letting my imagination get away with me. Whatever.
I was ready.
A hiss of steam, green lights across the board, and the front of the box popped forward and split apart. Just like before.
It took a moment for the steam to roil and dissipate away in snaky tendrils.
When it did, I saw the thing inside.
Chapter 2 - In the Hall
Era’s Journal, Entry #3155
There are moments in your life when everything you think you know gets turned upside down and stood on its head.
I’ve had more than my fair share of those moments.
This was another one.
As I stood there in front of the stasis pod I tried to picture how it could be any worse than this. I had prepared myself for so many possibilities, from the ridiculous to the impossible. I had been so sure of myself. So positive that I was doing the right thing. Coming here, against all odds, in a mad attempt to bring down the Restored Society. What was I thinking?
They’re too big for me to stop them. Too big for anyone to stop.
I’m just one girl.
One against many.
I wasn’t ready for this. How could I be?
How could anyone be ready for this?
I’m just one girl.
I was suddenly on my knees on that cold, hard floor… staring. Just staring.
The thing in the stasis pod twitched. Hands fluttered. The head rolled. Eyes…
Opened.
“Era Rae?” Jadran’s voice was insistent as he called to me through the speakers. “Recorders are live. Do you need me in there? What do you see?”
I took a breath, and I tried to speak, but I couldn’t. There were no words to describe this.
“I will be right there,” he told me.
“No!” That finally jolted me out of my shock. With a deep breath I jumped up to my feet, aiming the stun pistol. Would it be enough? “Jadran, stay there. I need you to keep monitoring the surface. Any activity?”
There was a pause. He was worried about me.
So was I.
“Understood, Era Rae,” he finally said. “There is nothing on the vid screens.”
“Great,” I muttered. Wait until he sees this.
The thing in the stasis pod moved.
With shaky hands I slid the stun pistol away again, at the small of my back. What good would it do me now?
As I watched the being in the pod waking up, I studied her.
Her.
She was wearing a black jumpsuit with thick soles at the feet. It covered her up to her neck and down to her wrists. I recognized the fabric. We used it at the Academy for the first few years of our lives. It was designed to stretch as the owner grew. A single article of clothing that could literally be worn for years.
So how long had she been in this pod?
Years, I suspect. At least sixteen years.
Above the neckline of her suit, around an oval face, long dark hair spilled over her shoulders. As dark as mine used to be before the merciless blazing sun in the Outlands had bleached it to a lighter brown. Moss green eyes fluttered under black eyebrows.
I’d never thought of myself as beautiful. Looking into that face, now, I can see I was wrong. There was a dark attraction in that face. A stark beauty that was impossible to mistake for anything other than what it was.
My face.
She took a step forward, blinking her eyes against the harsh light, focusing on the world around her for what might have been the very first time ever. Wires connected from the pod to a halo ring resting around her temples snagged tight as she pushed away from the plush and reclined surface she had been laying on. Absently she reached up and swept aside the device. Direct neural link, I realized. The halo device fed information straight into her brain. Knowledge, facts, training… whatever her creators thought she needed to know had been streaming into her brain all this time.
I was familiar with cloning tech from my Academy classes. Nothing this sophisticated, but I recognized it for what it was. The creature was a clone.
A clone… of me.
Her eyes focused on me as her hands found the edges of the opening and she stepped out of the stasis pod. She took another step, and another, reaching out toward me like I was the first human being she had ever seen in her life. Probably, I was.
Swallowing, remembering to breathe again, I got ahold of myself. This was crazy. Insane. Impossible… and damn it all to Hell they had no right! A clone. Of me. The Restored Society had made another me.
Another Era Rae.
I looked around me, at this room full of stasis pods, most of them lit up and active. No. It couldn’t be. I wouldn’t let myself believe it. Inside of the pods… what was inside all those pods?
The clone was watching me.
“Er, hi,” I said. What do you say when you’re meeting yourself for the first time? “My name is Era Rae. You’re… I mean, I’m… I mean… Hellfire. Can you understand me?”
She blinked again, looking down at her hand this time, flexing her fingers, turning her palm up, and then over again, and then looking up at me. “My name,” she said, the words slow and slurred, “is Era Rae.”
Repeating what I said. She was just mimicking me. Right. Well, at least she could speak. “Look, I know this is confusing for you. Let me try to explain—”
“Know this… is confusing for… you,
” she said.
“Okay, sure. Let’s try to keep on topic. Can you understand me? Can you…” Hellfire. How was I supposed to explain this? “Can you think for yourself?”
“I know…” she started. The words trailed off when she realized her hand was still stretched out. She held it back to her breasts. “I know this is confusing. For you.”
I sighed, and a host of emotions flooded out of me along with that breath. Anger, burning curiosity, and frustration chief among them. “Can you answer a question?” I asked her. “Can you tell me anything about yourself at all?”
“Era Rae?” This time it was Jadran’s voice repeating my name. “I think—”
“I know!” I shouted up at him. Then, when the clone widened her eyes I thought better of raising my voice around the newborn. More quietly, I added, “It’s all right, Jadran. Just keep recording.”
The clone looked up at the speakers, and then back at me. “I am Era Rae.”
“No, I’m Era Rae. You were grown in that stasis pod. I’m Era Rae, and you’re a lab experiment. I grew up in the real world, and you’ve been fed a series of electronic images and told they were real. Look, I know this is hard, but you have to listen to me.”
“Era Rae,” Jadran called to me again. “There are—”
“Not now, Jadran!”
The clone came closer, reaching out again. “I am Era Rae.”
“No, you’re not. I’m Era. You’re a damned lab experiment!”
“I know… this is confusing… for you…”
“Stop it!” I shrieked at her. “Listen to me. Try to understand.”
“I know this… is confusing for… you…”
“Stop it!”
I slammed my fists against my hips. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair!
She was close enough to touch me now, still repeating my words. “Confusing… for you.”
“I said, stop that!”
“I know this is confusing,” she repeated. “I am…”
“The hell you are!” I raised my fist and rammed it at her face. My face.
She caught my hand in mid-air.
Her eyes met mine, and something flashed in them. I recognized that look. The same look, the same feeling I got when the calm descended over me like a suit of armor.
I stood there, stunned into silence, waiting to see what would happen next.
“I know this is confusing for you,” my double said, in exactly my voice. Her eyes narrowed on mine as she finished the rest of it. “But I am Era Rae.”
In that instant, the sense of calm that had already gripped her washed over me, too. This was the genetically altered part that the Society had put into me. The human killing machine that could be tapped into whenever I was in trouble. They had wanted to use me as their weapon. My choice had been different. I couldn’t just kill someone without knowing the reason for it.
Apparently my clone didn’t have that same moral dilemma.
Her hand still holding mine, she twisted my arm around, coiling me in a circle, putting my back to her. She cranked on my wrist in a painful way and suddenly I was standing up on my tiptoes. Just like that, she had me in her control. I felt her grab ahold of the stun pistol.
I could not let her have that. If I did, there was very little doubt in my mind what would happen to me. I wasn’t going to let it come to that.
And I wasn’t exactly in her control. Not completely.
Pushing up off the floor overbalanced me and both of us went falling backward, landing on the floor in the space between two pods, her underneath me. It broke her grip. It almost broke my arm at the shoulder.
Spinning my body like a top, I landed with my knees across her midsection, straddling her body, and I punched down hard at her face.
She moved before the blow was even close. My knuckles hit empty floor. Which hurt. A lot.
Her elbow flashed up at my face. I countered it and drove forward with my knee and she used a palm strike to turn it away. I let my momentum carry me forward and bladed the side of my hand at her throat. She rolled her shoulder into it, spreading out the force of the blow and at the same time twisting her body to roll out from under me, sending me toppling the other direction.
It was like fighting myself.
I tried not to think about how accurate that thought might be.
Rolling easily to my feet I caught her next strike between my two forearms and twisted her arm down as I drove a knee up into her stomach.
Then I pushed her back, giving us some space, and tried to think through the grip of the calm. “Wait,” I said to her, holding up my hands. “You don’t have to do this. You have a choice.”
“I am Era Rae,” she said, in my voice, with my expression. “My choice is to serve. We hold the future in our hands. We strive against the darkness. We carry the hopes of all.”
The oath of the Academy. I hadn’t heard those words since I left Colony 41. Everyone raised in the Restored Society knew the oath. Everyone had been taught those principles.
Apparently, my clone had been force fed that information as well. The Restored Society had brainwashed her to live up to their ideals even as she grew up inside a metal box.
“You need to listen to me,” I pleaded with her. “You were grown here. In this facility. In that pod. You’re not real. You’re not me!”
“No,” she said in a cold, dry voice. “I’m not you. I’m me. I’m Era Rae.”
My teeth ground together. “Like Hellfire you are.”
The stun pistol was gone, spun away across the floor in our initial scuffle. All I had to defend myself with… was me. Ordinarily that would be more than enough. But now? This clone had been hooked up to neural training feeds for years. Was she more skilled than I was? Was she a better fighter? Every move I tried to make she already saw coming. She avoided everything I threw at her and gave me back just as hard.
Her eyes sparked, and I knew what she was about to do.
Spinning a half turn to the left, I struck out with both arms, stiff into her back as she tried to wrap her arms around my midsection and missed. The push sent her slamming into the side of the pod next to us, against the wide serrated edge, bouncing back onto her ass with her legs folded awkwardly underneath her.
“Like I told you,” I growled at her. “I’m Era Rae!”
She sat there, stunned, a thin trail of blood spilling out of a cut on her cheek. Her pale green eyes were wide and unfocused. “Then who am I?” she asked.
A cheap copy, was the answer that almost slipped off my lips. I had to wonder, though. If my DNA was manipulated at birth, and the clone had been growing in that pod long enough to be the same age as me… was this other girl really a copy?
Or was there something even more sinister going on…
From elsewhere in the room I heard a door slam open. The sound of running feet materialized into Jadran ducking between pods until he saw me and… the other me, here in front of stasis pod eighty-one. He stepped up close to me and put a hand on my arm. “This is not what we expected.”
“Nope,” I answered. I thought that summed it up pretty neatly.
“Changes everything, is what it does.”
“No. We stick to the plan.”
From the corner of my eye I could see him looking at me. No one else would be able to see how openly he was wearing his concern for me. I understood him better than that. “Stop worrying, Jadran. She and I had a disagreement, is all. We understand each other fine now.”
“What was the misunderstanding about?” Jadran asked in that straightforward way of his.
“She thought she was me,” I told him. “She’s not.”
From where she sat on the floor, the clone looked up at me, questions in her eyes. I had a few of those myself. More than a few. I didn’t know if she would have any answers, and neither of us was in any rush to ask any of it anyway, which was just as well. I wouldn’t be able to put enough words together to ever describe what I was feeling. Empty and about to burst, all at
once.
“Whatever we are about to do,” Jadran said to me after another moment, “we have to do it now. I tried to tell you from the control room. There are Enforcers marching across the desert above. They are here.”
My head began to pound. The Enforcers were here already. We were out of time.
“All right. Jadran and, uh…” What was I going to call my clone? Hellfire, I didn’t have time for this. It would have been so much easier if she’d just been some horrible monstrosity. “Just take her up to the control room with you. Did you find any defense systems up there?”
“You mean besides a self-destruct option? Just an electrified barrier field. I have it active, Era Rae, but it will not stop them for very long.”
What next, what next? I kept beating my brain, trying to think up a next move. An army at our doorstep, a room full of stasis pods I was too afraid to look into, and no idea on how to put my plan into action. Jadran had bought us some time with that barrier field, but how long would that give us, really?
“It’s going to have to be enough,” I decided. “Come on. While the Enforcers are stuck up top we have to do something down here.” Maybe I could open a vid channel and just make some kind of speech…
Footsteps echoed across the chamber.
Jadran and I looked at each other. “Did you open another stasis pod?” I asked him.
“No. The Enforcers haven’t reached the barrier yet, either. I activated it when they were just on the edges of the sensor display.”
“In other words,” I said, searching the floor for the stun pistol, “no one else should be here?”
“Correct,” he said to me.
“Unless,” a familiar voice said, “someone came in through the tunnels.”
The sound of that voice turned my insides to ice.
Era’s Journal, Entry #3156
There are some people who should just stay dead.
Tall and imposing in his straight-lined gray uniform, silver insignias at his short collar indicated his rank, the First Marshall of the Restored Society stepped across the chamber floor. The black strip up the side of the pant legs was new. He’d gone up a grade. Hard to get a promotion at his level. The First Marshalls practically ran the Restored Society.