by Sean Platt
Neven could feel his face changing, his emotions betrayed.
This couldn’t be true.
Ephraim was lying, trying to gain an edge. Trying to manipulate him.
Neven batted at the troublesome thoughts. But they circled, closing in like sharks around a thrashing seal. He recalled the photos of his father as a young man, explaining away the differences between him and Neven in terms of hairstyle, weight, and wardrobe. He recalled sections of his father’s notes that he supposed he’d read, but had somehow made himself forget. He remembered small things that his father’s AI hologram, back on Eden, had said while digesting Wallace’s files: mentions of a heritage that wasn’t exclusive to Wallace. Mentions of “mother.”
“I know who I am,” Neven said.
“Then you know you can open a jar. You know you can screw in a light bulb. You know you can shake a person’s hand and squeeze it firmly. How is your arthritis, Neven? Because even at your age, Wallace was half-crippled already.”
Neven’s eye went to the clock. Was this over?
“You care so much about living your legacy,” Ephraim continued, “but you’ve only fulfilled half of it. Even if you do this — even if you give the world the ability to clone at will, to duplicate anyone they see fit — it will never bring him back. It won’t make him proud. You know he turned his back on what he did to you and your brother. You know, if you’re honest, that it ate him up inside. It’s what changed Evermore’s direction. It’s what made him get back in touch with his old friend, to give back after being selfish for so much of his life.”
Neven looked at Timothy. He hadn’t known any of this.
“It’s most interesting that although Wallace’s genes made him impetuous and aggressive, something turned him toward a trait that was more epigenetic, more circumstantial: love. Nurture, winning out over nature.” Ephraim shook his head. “You’ve tried your whole life to be something you’re not, to please a version of your father who died long before Wallace actually did. But in the end, he was more like Mary. More like the half that’s hardwired into you, the part you’ve been smothering.”
Neven looked at the clock.
Fuck this.
Fuck Ephraim and his manipulative lies.
Fuck Timothy and his pitying expression.
Was this supposed to break his heart, sway him from his mission, and make him fall to the floor crying, pining for sainthood?
Of course not. Neven knew who he was, even if he wasn’t who he’d pretended to be.
“I’m not stopping the experiment,” Neven said, rediscovering his angry edge. “Whether I’m his clone or not, I’m still my father’s son.” His mouth worked as if it wanted to chew. Something was bubbling inside, and now Neven’s head was hot, his trigger finger edgy. “There’s great work to do here. Important work. And no amount of sob story will turn me into whatever it is you think I should suddenly decide I’m supposed to be.”
“Maybe not,” said Ephraim, “but you’re too smart to turn your back on the truth — so maybe you’ll be willing to meet me halfway.”
Chapter 64
Tweakers Will Tweak
“Halfway how?”
“I know why I’m different. Why I haven’t broken under the strain. I know what takes me one step further from being a 3.0 clone to something more like 4.0.”
Neven, taken off guard by the sudden change of topic, looked at Timothy. He clearly didn’t know what was coming either.
“It involves Sophie.” Ephraim was walking the edge of something, as if he wanted to tell Neven just enough without revealing too much. “She and I harmonize.”
“What does that mean?” Timothy and Neven traded a glance, suddenly on the same side of an unknown issue.
“I can show you how to create clones that are better than 2.0’s, without the line’s failings — but also without breaking them like you broke me.”
“How?”
“I can show you, but first you have to do something for me.”
There was silence. A clock ticked.
Timothy said, “Ephraim, I need to talk to you.”
“I’m talking to Neven right now.”
“In private,” Timothy said as if he hadn’t heard.
Timothy rose, but Neven stood to match him, pushing the man’s chest to urge him back down.
“This is for all of us,” Neven said. “My home, my rules.”
“This isn’t what we discussed,” Timothy argued.
“That’s why it’s a good idea.”
“Ephraim …”
“Agree that you’ll stop the open source release,” Ephraim said. “And I’ll let you scan Sophie and me all you want.”
“I refuse to make bargains that I can’t verify until later,” Neven said.
“You don’t have to verify it later. Sophie is here.”
“Ephraim!” Timothy blurted.
“Where?”
“Upstairs, I think.”
Neven turned and took a step toward the foyer.
“Just a scan,” Ephraim said. “You don’t get to draw her blood. You don’t get to keep her for any length of time.”
“Fine,” Neven agreed. “What’s the rest of your deal?”
“Stop this. Permanently. Agree never to release what I’ll show you to the world. You can scan Sophie to get that part— what you’ll incorporate into future trials — but nothing more. Once she’s scanned and safe, I’ll submit for a full examination. Scan, blood, whatever you need as long as Sophie walks away unharmed.”
“Ephraim,” Papa said.
“Tell me now. Show me later.”
“Stop the countdown.”
Neven reached for a tablet, verified with his thumbprint, and tapped. The countdown stopped onscreen.
“It’s paused. I said to stop it. Then delete the file.”
“I can just upload the same archive later. I have multiple backups offsite.”
“Then there’s no reason not to stop it now.”
Neven considered, then he tapped the screen and the countdown resumed. Pausing was a feint. A ticking clock had power. Neven was in charge and mustn’t show weakness.
“Think about this, Neven. I’m offering you a solution. You know my mind is failing, but if I show you what I know, you’ll finally be able to create what your father envisioned: perfect clones, with none of the earlier failings.”
“This is a mistake, Ephraim,” Timothy said.
Neven wasn’t sure when it had happened, but all three of them were now circling, like gunslingers squaring off.
“Stop the countdown, Neven. Then delete the file.”
“Tell me what’s different in you than the others,” Neven countered.
“Delete the file and I will.”
“How do I know you’ll keep up your end of the bargain?” Neven asked.
“Because this is the only way out for me, too.”
“You’re bluffing.”
“And you have nothing to lose if I am, other than a little bit of time.”
Neven considered. They were all pacing, the air tense. “Give me something.”
“No.”
“Then no deal.”
Timothy whispered to Ephraim, but Neven heard fine. “Stop this. Tell him you’re making it up or he’ll grab you and take it at knifepoint.”
Ephraim looked at Neven. “He needs a neutral mental state for his scan. If I’m thrashing and trying to kill him for snatching me, my scan will be useless. That’s the beauty. He needs my consent. Isn’t that right, Neven?”
“Convenient,” Neven said, “seeing as it covers your bullshit.”
“It’s not bullshit. You know I’m different; you can see it with your own eyes. You saw it on Papa’s preliminary scan. Don’t you want to know why?”
“I don’t need to know why. I don’t care.”
“There’s a way to do this where nobody gets hurt. If you release what you have — or what you’d get if you only sample me and make a note to up-regulate the
resulting clones’ hormones — it’ll cause chaos.”
“It’s proving my theory,” Neven said. “It’s proving what I know.”
“But your theory is wrong. Between you and your brother, the clone died. The organic twin prevailed.”
“Then I guess anything could happen, right?”
“Think about it, Neven. Step back from your grudge and your pain and think. Releasing 2.0 clones is wrong. They’re a doomed line. Releasing 3.0s who are manic and impulsive — a Band-Aid slapped over the larger problem of a disintegrating mind — is more spite than sense. If you really care about your father’s research, you’ll consider what I’m saying. You’ll be willing to keep the information in-house, working on it yourself. You wouldn’t want to release it because if I show you how Sophie and I are different, you can fix the flaw. This public display? It’s more about beating your chest than your father’s science. How can you possibly argue with that?”
Neven considered. It was true — all of it. But …
“Here’s the problem with your proposal, Ephraim. If you’re telling the truth, then fine, yes, I’d agree. But I have zero reason to believe you.”
Ephraim seemed to think. Then he said, “I can prove it. You have my baseline scan. If you get one from Sophie — just a quick pass — you’ll see where they harmonize. If you see that much, will it convince you?”
Timothy seemed to believe it. His head was shaking, watching Ephraim.
“You can’t show him whatever it is you want to show him.”
“Papa, this is the only option. The only way everyone gets what they want and we get out alive.”
“He won’t do what he says. You’ll give him what he wants, and he’ll release it to the world anyway.”
Eyes on Neven, Ephraim said, “Then at least he’ll be releasing 4.0 clones instead of 3.0 meth heads.”
“The GEM database,” Papa said. “Any lab will be able to clone anyone. The tweakers will tweak every stage of the process. This is information the world can’t get, and that you can’t ever erase.”
“Papa …”
“Listen to me, Ephraim. Don’t.” Papa glanced at Neven, then continued talking to Ephraim. “You don’t know him like I do. You don’t know how insane he is.”
Was this an act? Had they scripted this exchange, just to fool Neven?
“He’ll keep his word because he’s too smart not to. Because he knows that research fulfills the vision and chaos ruins them.”
“Them?” Neven echoed.
“Half of what’s in you wants your father’s vision,” Ephraim said. “But whether you like it or not, you’re also your mother’s son.”
What did that mean? That Neven would suddenly want to donate to charity, feed the sick, and save the whales? The presumption in Ephraim’s voice — and the way they kept talking about him as if he wasn’t here — only angered him further.
“Prove that what you say is true,” Neven growled, “and I’ll consider it.”
“I need Sophie to prove it. So you can scan her.”
“Then get her, and make me a believer.”
Ephraim tipped his head and called deeper into the cabin. “Sophie!”
“I can’t let you do this,” Papa said.
“You don’t have a choice.”
Neven picked up his tablet and showed them the timer. “Forty minutes.”
“It’s enough time to do your scan and see what I’m talking about. Sophie!”
“Maybe you scared her,” Neven said.
“SOPHIE! Come down here!”
“She won’t come until we need her,” Timothy said.
“We need her now.”
“Not for your bullshit,” Timothy said. “Sophie believes me. She trusts me. And in my message, I told her to lay low.”
“I left her a message, too,” Ephraim countered, “and I told her to come out.”
There was a noise from Neven’s tablet. He looked at it and laughed, seeing the ping against the jamming bubble he’d put over the cabin and its grounds. He tapped a button marked ALLOW, and seconds later Ephraim’s Doodad was ringing.
“Let’s see where this goes,” Neven said.
He could see the caller’s name on-screen even from where he was standing: EPHRAIM TODD.
Chapter 65
The Cause of All That Was Happening
SOPHIE!
A psychic feeling — something she felt in her bones. Vague but present. Urgent. The waiting was over, and the time to act was now.
There was a pipe in the corner — something that seemed like a leftover bit of electrical conduit. She picked it up, suddenly sure she could squeeze it enough to bend.
Down the hall, through the door with the big silver 13.
And nobody inside
With her heart pounding, Sophie scanned the room. She didn’t realize it until she burst through the door, but she supposed her intention had been to charge Neven and beat him until he stopped doing … whatever was upsetting Ephraim.
But there was no Neven here.
No Papa.
No Ephraim.
Only the big room with its screens. A digital clock, everywhere. A desk like a console, flanked by others.
And, curiously, a child’s toy fire engine with a hand-lettered flag on the ladder that read, PRESS THE BIG RED BUTTON.
Sophie looked down. She saw a big red button all right, but when she pressed it, all it did was press her back. There was a small but sharp pain, and when she pulled her hand away, she saw that her middle finger was leaking a tiny drop of blood.
Nothing happened.
She ripped the flag from the fire engine’s ladder, wadded it up, then used it as padding to press the button again. And again. Still, nothing happened.
Maybe this was the wrong place. The room was large but straightforward, so unless the trio of men she’d expected to find had crouched down or backed into the shadows — purposely hiding, as if for fun — they simply weren’t here. There was a lot of equipment and the big clock on the big monitor, repeated dozens of times on all the room’s smaller monitors.
00:00:00:36:15.
00:00:00:36:14.
Sophie was holding the pipe in a death grip, so she set it down. Her heart was pounding loud enough to hear, but slowing. She’d managed to get herself worked up enough to burst in and fight, but seeing as there was no battle to be had, Sophie would have to do it again.
It had seemed logical to make for the largest cube because it would probably be this strange place’s brain. But even though she saw little occupation hints that suggested Ephraim and Papa had probably been here, they weren’t around now. That meant they were probably in one of the other cube-shaped rooms. She’d seen how big Neven’s “Domain” was once she’d passed the ring of trees, and Papa had said that it might have as many as three hundred rooms. Fear didn’t fill her, thinking about that. It was tedium.
She noticed something odd in the corner and approached it, squinting. Sophie could have sworn she’d heard voices. But the acoustics were odd. In a place like this, a mouse could fart at one end and the strange angles could probably twist those vibrations into a symphony.
Wasn’t there something you were supposed to do in big, empty places when stalking forward like an idiot damsel in a slasher flick?
“Hello?” Sophie called.
No slashers sprung from the shadows to answer.
She turned to the thing she’d seen earlier — a single spot lit beyond the counter. The light was above a transparent box about the size of a large, two-door kitchen cabinet. Inside it was a tiny riser, like a platform. On it there was a black device with a cord running from its rear.
The cabinet’s front doors were ajar. Sophie opened them the rest of the way. The black thing inside was the perfect size for its miniature throne, but someone had tossed it in, half-on and half-off. She reached in to adjust, and was holding the object before she knew it.
It was lighter than she’d expected. Wafer-thin but not fragile. I
t was shaped in a semicircle, like a Roman crown. She turned it over. Had someone tried to burn it? There were scratches on it, like it had been forced open. There was a small engraved mark at one of the front protrusions. She ran her thumb across it, then tilted it to eye it in the light. A logo: a stylized R, flanked by wavy lines like water.
Riverbed.
Sophie almost dropped the device in surprise, superstitiously afraid. The thing in her hands was the reason Ephraim had taken her to Eden. It was, in its way, the cause of all that was happening.
The Quarry.
She surveyed the room. There was an area against another wall with chairs and a large table, like a break spot. The computer consoles, the screens, the fire engine toy, the button that bit back. There were two sets of footprints that didn’t match hers.
They’d been here. And obviously long before them, Neven had been, too. And yet the Quarry was left behind, right out in the open?
Sophie plucked the cord from the Quarry’s back as the Doodad chirped in her pocket.
She pulled it out. On the lock screen was a message from someone whose name Sophie didn’t recognize. Someone trying to reach the Doodad’s original owner, she supposed.
She returned the Doodad and was about to slide the Quarry into her jacket when she stopped.
She set the unplugged Quarry back in its case and retrieved the Doodad.
Full bars. Plenty of service. And yet she’d been checking ever since she was halfway across the water in her rented boat, certainly once she’d arrived at the clearing and looked up to see the Domain looming over her like a great white monster. She wanted to see if Papa had left any new messages — ideally, one that said: It’s all finished, Sophie, so you can leave that terrible place and come home to a big pitcher of margaritas. But even if there were no updates, she’d have liked to hear his last message once more.
No updates, and yet they’d come to the Domain just like Papa’s last message had said they were going to.