by Sean Platt
Sophie’s eyebrows had furrowed as she’d looked at Fiona. You’re saying you’re a clone?
We could go down the hall, and I could show you my old body if you want.
Then Fiona had cracked her knuckles, seeming to relish the simplest of movements. She stretched, rolled her neck, turned to look where she pleased without assistance.
This new body needs to wake up a bit, she’d said, flexing her fingers, but give it a week and it’ll be strong enough.
Sophie was winded by the time she reached the strangely appointed porch near the top cube. She’d climbed too fast. She had replayed her conversation with Fiona again and again over the last week, looking for flaws. Searching (if she was honest with herself) for any reason to stay away. In many ways, if she’d been able to conclude that Fiona was only laying a trap, she’d have been happier. The return was chilling.
But as she replayed the encounter now, Sophie believed Fiona. It was different than simply wanting to.
Six days. That’s all it took. In six days, God made the world — and in six days, using Neven’s machines, I made this. Fiona had extended an arm, then a leg. Her old body hadn’t moved below the neck.
But your mind, Sophie had said. Cloning made your body, but what about your mind?
All this time I’ve been trying to get the Quarry back, I never wanted it for itself. I know how to make a new Quarry if I want one.
She’d used the joystick to move her weak self closer to the cabinet, and this time her touch to the matte black device was reverent.
But this? This was my original canvas. What I wanted wasn’t in the Quarry’s functional circuitry. It was in its memory.
Hearing this, Sophie had looked down at the black device. The char mark was only on one side. Neven hadn’t destroyed it, probably because he’d wanted Papa and Ephraim to take it, knowing the homing signal would draw the authorities to them as seeming accomplices. Being plugged in — and broadcasting its beacon — meant that parts were intact. Like the resident memory chip.
You used it on yourself. The Quarry had your mind’s pattern stored in its memory all along.
Fiona had nodded. Months and months ago. Maria will have to fill me in on what happened since the day I made the pattern we just uploaded into my new body.
But you’re … Sophie didn’t know how to ask. Or maybe I should say, you’re NOT …
The process Neven used to move his mind into his new body was, ironically, devoid of the problems that the Quarry process created when he paired it with beta-type cloning. Neven dripped his mind into a small drive called a Hopper. The problem with using the Hopper here, at the Domain, was that it was far too slow for his needs. The Quarry was faster, but introduced flaws given his usage. But in time Neven will realize the same thing if he hasn’t already: he had the way to make stable clones from the start. Mark my word, if they ever let him out, restarting Hopper research will be the first thing he tries.
But you used the Quarry on yourself …
Like I told you, I saw a lot of shortcomings in Neven’s process — things I could improve. Nobody knows the Quarry like I do. Neven might have been able to benefit from it, if he had asked.
Now, forcing herself to slow down, Sophie let herself into the Domain’s top hallway. She didn’t turn toward the big control room this time, but instead to the first door beyond it — Cube 13. There was one small thing she needed to do before setting the fires that would erase this place from history.
Sophie tried not to lower her guard. Maybe she did want new karma to go with her new body. It was hard to believe. But half the proof, as Sophie opened the cube’s door, was right there in front of her.
This room was empty the last time.
Now, it was not.
Everyone I work with on certain types of projects, Fiona had told Sophie, submits to this.
Indicating the Quarry.
Everyone, Sophie. And with that, Fiona had given a meaningful nod.
Sophie closed the door behind her. The stool was where she’d left it. After they’d finished, Fiona and Maria (soon to become an assistant rather than a caretaker, Sophie assumed) took their leave. Then Sophie had come to this cube to follow Fiona’s orders, jet black hair stubbornly stuck to her shirt as if it had intentionally come along for the ride.
It would take six days to finish, but Sophie hadn’t been able to resist sitting on the stool to watch the reagents dissolve the hair, then listening to the micro centrifuge whirring in time with the helicopter leaving the roof.
The process, Fiona had told her, needed to be pushbutton-simple to operate at the speed and volume required by Neven’s plan. Sophie started it simply enough. Precipitous Rise — adapted by Evermore, honed by Neven, and optimized by Fiona — would take it from there.
The first strands of the new Ephraim clone would drop into the tank seconds after the centrifuge stopped, but nothing would be visible for days. Sophie didn’t care. She’d stayed on her stool until she was sure he’d be in there, watching nothing, trying not to hope beyond the frayed strength of her broken heart.
He won’t be like me, Fiona had warned after she’d shown Sophie how to pull Ephraim’s stored Quarry pattern into the cube’s machinery. I scanned Ephraim at the beginning. Before this all began. Do you understand what I’m saying?
Sophie nodded, trying not to betray the sinking feeling in her stomach. She’d heard it from Fiona and then the same through Papa, about the newly arrested Hershel Wood: when old patterns were loaded into new bodies, the resulting clones knew nothing that had happened since their most recent scan.
When she pulled Ephraim from the tube and woke him, he wouldn’t remember her. Worse, he wouldn’t even know her, since “remembering” implied he’d once known and forgotten.
This would be a new Ephraim — rewound to a day before this all started.
He wouldn’t know her. This version hadn’t even met the original Sophie Norris since Fiona’s scan predated his first trip to Eden.
At least he won’t have all of his damage, she thought, breaking the tube’s seals, releasing the rank, pent-up scent of cloning fluid. The way his mind had been falling apart at the end? The way he and Papa both felt he was terminal? He’s before that now.
He’d be safe, at least, even if that meant he had to be numb.
You understand, don’t you?
Sophie had nodded at Fiona, but true understanding hadn’t hit her until she’d returned to The Vineyard, telling residents a version of events that was missing Fiona.
Once home, Sophie understood what she’d meant.
Fiona’s mind transfer had worked because it used the optimized process, and because the original mind had been so excellent. But Ephraim’s had been that of a 1.0 clone. The man in the tube wouldn’t be her Ephraim at all.
The new clone sat up. Nude, wet, disgusting with fluid. He retched, and the oxygen-rich liquid he’d been pushing in and out of his lungs like a baby in an amniotic sac came splashing out and down the floor drain.
The new Ephraim Todd wiped fluid from his face. He blinked, testing his eyes. His body would be weak until he started using it, like Fiona’s had been, but his mind should be there.
And confused.
From the clone’s perspective, the last thing he’d remember was probably going into Fiona’s office, maybe lying on her couch, then having an odd object fitted onto his head. Maybe there was a dark space after that, like sleep. And then suddenly, without reason or warning, he was waking up naked in a bath of rank liquid.
He looked up. Met Sophie’s eyes.
“What the hell is going on here?” He looked down, around. “Where am I?”
“It’ll take some time to explain. I—”
“And who the hell are you?”
The question hurt much more than it should have. Fiona had warned her, and the truth was self-evident. This was Ephraim as he’d existed nearly a year ago. Another clone who didn’t know what he was, who could probably be deprogrammed and become
someone different. She could, in time, tell him his recent history — but no amount of explanation would restore the past — or make feelings return.
She looked at Ephraim, unable to speak.
At least he was alive. As an approximate copy of the man who, if he were terminally broken, might come to be somewhat like her Ephraim before the damage killed him. Or who might not.
His fearful eyes fixed her, their anger growing. He didn’t like this, or understand it. Sophie was an abductor. Someone on the other side, doing evil things to a man who hadn’t so much as committed his first act of espionage or murder.
She’d told only one person because without an outlet, she’d have gone mad. And Hannah had replied: It’s not all lost. You had a real connection, Sophie. You had magnetism, from the start.
It was airy-fairy, but true. She’d fallen for Ephraim because she was programmed to, then fell for real when they met as new people. She’d felt a spark for Real Ephraim, and he’d felt it for her. Ephraim had even connected, he’d said, with Real Sophie.
There was something within them. Something that transcended linear logic, calling this man in any form to this woman in any form.
Ephraim, on that first day, meeting her eyes.
The same spark — more confused than acknowledged — that she saw deep within him now as he struggled to process.
Even what Papa had said about the Altruance Brown who’d become Timothy: that he felt Ephraim within him, like an imprint on his soul.
She took his hand. He flinched away.
She tried again, and he let her hold it.
“Who are you?” This time he emphasized on are instead of you. The accusation was gone. Now it was as if he knew something he couldn’t articulate, sensing a mystery.
He won’t be the Ephraim you knew, Fiona had said. He’ll be the original Eden clone he was when I mapped his mind. To you, this new one will seem to be asleep. Something happened the first time that turned him into the man you knew, but no amount of Quarry or gene sequencers can change a 1.0 clone into 3.0 or beyond.
Reaching deep within. Seeing what she felt.
Sophie closed her eyes while the new Ephraim watched her. She tried to sense the old electricity, tried to reach that thing deep within them both, more slippery than the clone’s coated hands.
Maybe nobody knew how exactly the first Ephraim clone had evolved into the man she’d loved.
Nobody but Ephraim himself, who’d left her a message she’d only heard later, like a call from beyond the grave.
His voice on her voicemail, replayed so many times that Sophie knew the closing by heart:
I don’t know what will happen next. So much is uncertain. But if … well, if anything goes wrong or anything changes, just know that you’ve changed me for the better. Even if it doesn’t seem that way, that’s what it is. Better. You made me who I am. Without you, Sophie, I’m nothing.
Love.
Like Lennon promised the world, that was all you needed.
She watched his eyes, neither of them saying a word. Yet it was as if she could see knowledge pouring into him — truer than databanks and the lab and the cloud. Knowledge from beyond. A secret ingredient given by life, that only needed time to heal.
“My name is Sophie …” she said, trailing off to let the words do their work. Squeezing his hands. Watching his brow twitch, transfixed by his dancing eyes. “Do you remember?”
SHIT FROM BRAINS
The Tomorrow Gene, for us as writers, was the project that wouldn’t end. Not because it was a boondoggle or an albatross or any other funny-sounding word that equates to “pain in our asses,” but because it kept changing shape in front of us. At first it was five books, then three, then five again and then three again. We revamped the drafts of books 1 and 2 once we realized where book 3 was likely to head, to make the story resonate better. We planned. We had meetings and planned again. I stalled; emergency sessions were booked to rescue me. All told, this series took somewhere between 5-7 times as long to finish as we expected … and even in the final weeks, it kept expanding like “the blob” in that old sci-fi movie.
This was our May and June of 2017:
“Hey, Sean. I should be done with the final Tomorrow Gene book on Friday.”
Then: “Hey, Sean. Maybe the following Wednesday.”
Then: “Okay. Friday. I mean it this time.”
And then a few more days and a few more days. During those always-elongating end weeks, writing wasn’t slow or difficult for me at all, as the first-draft writer. There was just a lot, LOT more story than we’d originally thought, and all of it needed to be told.
One box to close in the narrative, then another. And on and on and on.
The good news is that for you as the reader, this is an awesome thing. The last weeks of writing felt like walking through an endless funhouse. Every time I thought I’d reached the book’s climax, it turned out there was a bigger climax waiting right around the corner. It was cool as hell to discover as I went — a process that’s a lot like what you experience while reading. This book kept even us on our toes, so I’m thinking it kept you on yours.
Fortunately, all that confusion alchemized into a story so much cooler than we’d imagined. A story that said a lot more than we’d originally realized it would say. I’m delighted to say that as slippery as The Tomorrow Gene was for us, all our groping in the dark and wondering if we’d ever finish was worth the stress.
Looking back now, as a post-mortem on the process, I see why we underestimated this project, and why it had no choice but to unfold as it did whether we knew it or not.
Set the way-back machine for the day I finished the draft of the second book, and began thinking about what might happen in the third.
On that day, Sean and I both thought this final book would be about Neven releasing his clones on the world, havoc ensuing, and some sort of New World rising. Neven was brewing shit at the Domain and Papa Friesh was going to try and stop it. That all sounded good until we realized that Ephraim had, in our proposed story, become little more than a hired gun. The powers were Papa and Neven. Ephraim and Sophie were going to fight on the side of Good over Evil, but really just as soldiers.
That was stupid.
And to our credit, we realized it was stupid in time to fix it. We saw that this final book couldn’t be about Neven’s plans and Papa’s thwarting them. It had to be about Ephraim. Ideally (though we saw no idea how at first), it would also be about Sophie. In almost all good stories, there’s one main character and the journey is about seeing how that character rises to a challenge, fights against it, and changes in the process. In our first attempt, we’d made Ephraim peripheral to Papa and Neven. It meant that all that you’ve watched Ephraim go through in the first two books didn’t really matter, because Ephraim’s struggles weren’t what caused things with Neven or prevented them in the end.
We couldn’t send Ephraim to Eden and reveal that he was a clone in book 1, pit him against the triad of GEM/Fiona/Neven in book 2 and have him change again through the act of “killing” his maker, and then settle back in book 3 and tell Neven’s story. The idea was ridiculous.
So we started asking hard questions like, “How did Ephraim’s life make Neven’s plot possible? Why does Neven NEED Ephraim to do what he wants to do?”
And: “How can Ephraim — and Ephraim alone — be able to thwart Neven?” Because it wasn’t enough if Papa thwarts him and Ephraim helps. Ephraim had to be a linchpin, nothing less.
What the whole thing taught us was that this wasn’t a trilogy. Not really. It was one big story, packaged in three pieces.
And that big story? It was about nature versus nurture. It asked the question of whether we are what we are created to be, or if we can “change our stars.” Our complete, coherent story had to do that Realm & Sands thing we do: to probe at life’s biggest quandaries and try to find answer. Is there something that makes us “us” beyond our genes and the electrochemical signals that comprise o
ur thoughts?
I’d argue yes. There’s mind, there’s body, and there’s spirit. That’s what makes me think that nobody will ever make perfect clones, if “perfect” means “a true duplicate of someone else.” I think that Neven remained Neven after he died and respawned, but I wouldn’t think the same if the first Neven hadn’t died before the second was created. I know it’s a contradiction. What do you want from us? We can’t have all the answers.
Which leads me to the final point. To the issue on which I’ll close this note. And that’s the question of whether Sophie will get her Ephraim back.
But I’m not going to answer it. We ended this book with a question mark for a reason.
I have my opinion, but it’s just an opinion.
What’s yours?
Johnny B. Truant
Austin, Texas
June 22, 2017
SO WHAT’S NEXT?
Sucks finishing a series, doesn’t it? Well, fear not because you can begin something new right now — our high tech science fiction/political series, The Beam.
When all of humanity is connected, the center of the Web is the seat of true power.
In a century, the world’s old political borders have dissolved. At the center of what remains of civilization sits the NAU, a nation ruled by two political parties: Enterprise, the sink-or-swim party where each party member has no one else to blame for their starvation or astronomical wealth, and Directorate, whose members have a guaranteed safety net but can never rise above their station.
Every six years, an election determines the course of the NAU’s future. The process is called Shift, and the next one is coming soon. With humanity intertwined by way of the Beam — a hyper-advanced version of the Internet that serves every whim and need — Shift is the be-all and the end-all. More than an electoral method, it is the future’s political discourse..
In the midst of the country’s tumultuous politics, certain players are making their own moves. Doc, a black-market nanoenhancement vendor, has caught wind of a disturbing trend of enhancements among his clientele. Nicolai, political speechwriter for the head of Directorate, struggles to find his independence in a life that is supposed to be devoted to the Party, all the while unaware of his own terrifying connection to the Beam. And Kai, an escort and assassin as lethal as she is flexible, becomes embroiled in the machinations of her top clients — because after all, the political elite choose only the best to warm their sheets at night.