by Sean Platt
“Want me to get you a MyLife of what happened?”
“There’s a MyLife record? You mean from the Sophie?”
“Not from her.” Mercer seemed troubled, and Neven wondered, what went wrong with the Sophie Norris clone? She was supposed to be in custody, under control and accessible through the right programming and bribes. But judging by Mercer’s face, that hadn’t happened.
“I meant from Clone Ephraim. GEM cut out his implant, but I could snag its signal right up until they did.”
Neven frowned. He’d process these strange feelings later. “Yes. Please. I’d like to see what happened.”
Mercer nodded.
“Is my record intact?” Neven flexed his hands, trying to get the feel of flexing his mind as well. He was a little scattered, but his thoughts seemed whole enough. He felt like he belonged in this body, despite the fact that this same identity was once in another.
Mercer shrugged. “Dunno. You designed this. You were the one who was so persnickety about the whole ‘dying first’ thing. It’s splitting hairs. Just because the original you had to die for your mind to download into this body doesn’t mean you’re not technically a copy.”
“It’s different. If there’s only one me at a time, then I’m the original. Just relocated.”
“If you say so. I think a clone is a clone. ‘Course, the Eden hologram said something about that, while we were waiting for you to download. I think he was trying to make me feel better with your life in my hands.” Mercer laughed.
“The hologram of my father?”
“If that’s what you call him. ‘Course, that’s my point, you calling him that. I guess he didn’t mind breaking confidentiality, seeing as you were dead at the time.”
Neven’s eyes flicked toward pieces of the room’s technology. Intellectually, he knew the AI behind the Wallace hologram was just data and hence could be transferred anywhere, but it seemed strange that it had recently been here, at the Domain, rather than on Eden. But then again, Neven wasn’t on the island anymore — or even the same man he’d recently been. Things in life were meant to change. To evolve, as it were.
“What did the hologram tell you?” Neven asked, moving to sit on one of Mercer’s chairs.
“That you were always a clone — a clone of him. Wallace told me that he didn’t have you with a woman. He made you.”
Neven wiped goo from his hands. He felt annoyed. Why had the AI felt the need to say that? The process seemed to have worked just fine from the Hopper to DataCrate, from DataCrate to the new shell body they’d cloned and had ready here, waiting for the moment Neven’s heart stopped beating.
So far, everything about the process was well — down to Neven feeling like Neven rather than being a duplicate with similar memories. But there were still glitches in the process. The AI was blabbing to undesirables about things Neven would have rather kept secret.
“I’m his son.”
“He said you were a clone, just like the others.”
“The others are grown to adulthood in days, filled with stock memories, and conditioned. I was my father’s first clone. He made me the old-fashioned way. I was cloned as an embryo but grew in a surrogate. I was born as a baby. He raised me. I grew up just like you did.”
And so what if his DNA was the same as his father’s? What more flattering thing could a father do for his son than to create him in his own image?
Mercer raised his hands. “Whatever you say, Boss.” Then he slapped his legs, clearly uncomfortable. Mercer and Neven had never gotten along, but now they were the only two sharing this secret. “What now. Back to Eden?”
“No. Eden is finished.”
“You want to rebuild here at the Domain?” Mercer nodded. “I wondered. The AI said something about that, too. About how his old friend Timothy—”
Neven cut him off. “There’s a lot of work to do. A lot of misdirection and new ways to go. The Ephraim clone is one proof of concept and this—” He gestured down at his brand-new body, exactly like the old one. “—is another.”
“You mean the clone that killed you? How is that proof of anything other than his being an asshole?”
A smile touched Neven’s lips. “I only had to threaten the Sophie clone, and Ephraim stepped right up. What does that tell you?”
“Dunno. What?”
“That clones are more perfect than natural-born humans. Humankind can evolve over thousands of years, but clones evolve with every iteration. They experience intra-personal evolution. And—” He walked back to the tube that had held his fresh body until his mind had occupied it. There were other Nevens somewhere, all soon to be hooked to a cloud backup of his mind once the Quarry was reverse-engineered.
“—and now, we can have immortality.”
Mercer looked uncomfortable. He wasn’t a clone, but Neven had been one kind of clone and was now another — different, from those that Eden had sold. Once his clone blanks were hooked to real-time DataCrate, Neven could never die. Kill one, and he’d instantly download into a fresh one.
A new world order for Neven. For others hiding in plain sight. And for those clients willing to pay for The Lazarus Gene and bask in eternity.
“So you got the Quarry from the Mauritius police?” Neven asked.
Mercer nodded. He reached onto a shelf for a slim box, removed the delicate-looking instrument inside, and set it into Neven’s hands.
“What is it?” Mercer asked.
Neven stood, looking down at the slim object in his hands. Forget the shower. There was more to do before he rested.
“It’s what we did all of this for. The reason the Ephraim clone was created. The reason I needed him to follow my subliminal suggestions and come to Eden and provide the way for me to slip away from Eden in a way that assured nobody would be looking for me, and that a scapegoat would fall right into place.”
Mercer waited, arms crossed. He wasn’t appreciating the dramatic build-up. Such a killjoy.
“This is what will make DataCrate work on a large scale,” Neven said. “I had to drip my mind into the Hopper over the course of months, then have the drive shipped here for you to upload. The Quarry can map a mind in minutes. Once we deploy its technology, we can make backups in real-time, wirelessly to the cloud.” He frowned. “You’ve heard all of this before, Mercer. It’s why there are extra copies of my body. And of other bodies.”
“I’m not so sciency. I just do as I’m told.”
Neven nodded. That was true. Mercer was a loathsome asshole, but a thief you could count on.
“So where is my good friend?”
“The Ephraim clone? He’s in New York, with GEM. I thought you wanted—”
“Not him. I’m talking about my other friend.”
“Oh. Just down the hall. The process wasn’t quite the same as yours, though.”
“Are you referring to his extra conditioning?”
“Yeah,” Mercer said. “You’re still Neven. I just copied your mind into the new body. But he’s … well, you know.”
“Suggestible?” Neven volunteered.
“I was going to say, ‘Brainwashed.’”
Neven didn’t like the word, despite its truth. He motioned for Mercer to lead the way.
They went down a long hallway much brighter and more sterile than the corner Mercer had made his own. Then through a locked door, down another hallway where finally they arrived in a room full of clone tubes.
On first glance, Neven saw Aaliyah Bell, Amélie Lajoie, and the two most famous adult actresses in the world: Majestic and Slava. At the end, there was one last tube. In it, he saw a new clone. Beside it hung a dangling cord, a port into which a world-changing device had so recently been plugged.
“May I?” Neven asked.
Mercer nodded. “He just needs to be woken. He’s ready, like you were.”
Neven opened the tube. Inside, the clone opened its eyes.
“What’s your name?” Neven asked.
It blinked. “Hershe
l Wood.” It looked around. “Where am I?”
“Safe,” Neven said.
He waited, recalling his own disorientation. This clone wasn’t like Neven; it wasn’t a download of one continuous mind. It was a true copy of Hershel Wood, not the man himself in a new place.
Neven could sympathize with the oddity it must be feeling. A moment ago, that mind inside its head would have felt like it’d been nowhere. Now it was here, blinking for clarity, unsure about everything.
A brand new clone. A baby of the New Way, superior to the births of the Old Way, just as his father had once envisioned before Neven took the mantle and pushed the cause to its inevitable conclusion.
“Be patient,” Neven told the clone. “Just wait, and the confusion will clear.”
It was blinking. Looking around. Lost and alone.
Neven took the clone’s hand. He met its eyes. And he thought to the heavens: DataCrate is real. It worked, Father.
Ephraim’s clone had done all he was meant to and then evolved into more. It was an amazing day, a brand new, terrifying, wonderful beginning for them all. Wallace would be proud.
“I still don’t know where I am,” said Wood’s double.
“It will be all right,” Neven soothed the clone. “It’s okay to be afraid.”
WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
The world is up in arms after a brutal murder is captured on video and broadcast around the globe.
The man responsible, Ephraim Todd — who previously burned the island of Eden to ashes — is alone and incarcerated, trapped in a world where no one believes his story. Yes, he killed Neven Connolly, but it was in self-defense.
Unknown to Ephraim, Neven is alive and well. His death was all part of the plan, and Ephraim played his part so perfectly well. Now all Neven needs is for Ephraim to stay in jail and out of the way.
But Ephraim escapes with the help of one of the world’s most powerful and beloved people—a man who may be to blame for the end of the world as we know it.
Will Ephraim stop Neven before it’s too late, or is the end of humanity one Tomorrow Clone away?
CLICK HERE TO GET THE TOMORROW CLONE
SHIT FROM BRAINS
This was a strange but very satisfying book to write. It took one story and made it into a different one.
Because, get this:
We knew from the start that while The Tomorrow Gene would have an insular feel, The Eden Experiment would necessarily come out into the wider world. In this second book, Ephraim would no longer be trapped on Eden, going nuts and wondering why; instead, he’d be back home in New York, beginning to learn about his own future and Eden’s larger plan.
And that changed the whole feel of the story. Once Ephraim hit NYC, the external forces after him (Eden, Fiona, GEM) would give this second installment a fundamentally different feel. It’s similar, really, to the Alien movie franchise. The first movie is horror: one very scary alien against a handful of people trapped on a ship. The second movie is action-adventure: space marines versus a huge nest of aliens able to spread out across an entire planet.
The Tomorrow Gene is mostly a psychological thriller: one man doing battle, in part, with his own mind and reality. Not to spoil anything, but the third and final book in the series is almost entirely a traditional-style thriller: one team versus another in the wider world. That put the book you just read squarely in the middle, halfway between the two types of books. The Eden Experiment is half psychological, half external. It’s what happens when an unreliable narrator is released into a world that, it turns out, is against him just as much as his paranoia claims.
We wanted to continue the lost feeling Ephraim had throughout The Tomorrow Gene as we told the story in this second book. Neven really screwed Ephraim up in the first book’s final pages: Ephraim doesn’t yet know what he truly is, but you as the reader do. You know all sorts of other things Ephraim doesn’t know, as well: Neven and Jonathan are controlling him and always have been; he’s “different” somehow and while his breaking mind is necessary, it’s also a dangerous line to walk. And of course you know that Neven’s plans differ from what he tells Jonathan they are, and perhaps vice-versa. The ground is supposed to feel uncertain here. That’s what makes it such a head-trip.
But at the same time, we wanted to give you some real-world grounding — stuff that’s actually going wrong for Ephraim in addition to what he’s simply afraid of. We wanted to introduce you to some very important players whose purpose and meaning will become more apparent in the final book in the series: Hershel Wood, Mercer Fox, Clone Sophie, others. So there was a line to walk. And that was fun, as writers.
By now, if we’ve done our job, you’re simultaneously 1) thrilled by the heart-pounding conclusion to this book, 2) really damn curious what will happen next and why we see the trio in the final scene that we do, and 3) still a little unsettled. Enjoy the uncertainty; Ephraim’s paranoia will die in the final book as this story finds its true grounding in reality. Soon you’ll no longer wonder what’s actually going on, as Ephraim wonders. Soon, after you finish the next and final book in the series, you’ll flat-out know. You’ll have all the answers.
And man, those answers are doozies.
I’ll talk about some of those doozies in the author’s note for the final book, and there’s always plenty more behind-the-scenes for any one book in the “Backstory” recording that goes with it. (You listen to those, right? You should, if you read author’s notes! We’ll have a Backstory episode for the entire Tomorrow Gene series at the end of book three). But for now, let’s just say that this trilogy surprised us just as much as it’s likely to surprise you. Let’s just say that what Neven and Wood and Jonathan and Fiona and Ephraim and everyone else are up to is a lot bigger than even we — as the authors — originally thought.
Which I guess is my way of saying that this book wasn’t just a mindfuck to read. It was a mindfuck to write, too.
Make sure you’re on our mailing list so we can tell you about the third book. Because what happens there is going to kick your teeth right in.
Johnny B. Truant
May 25, 2017
Austin, Texas
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The discovery of objects approaching from Jupiter orbit immediately sets humanity on edge. NASA doesn't even bother to deny the alien ships' existence. The popular Astral space app (broadcasting from the far side of the moon and accessible by anyone with internet) has already shown the populace what is coming. So the news has turned from evasion to triage, urging calm and offering the few facts they have: The objects are enormous, perfectly round spheres numbering in the dozens, maybe hundreds. They are on an approach vector for Earth. And they will arrive in six days.
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Sean Platt & Johnny B. Truant
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Sean Platt is the bestselling co-author of over 60 books, including breakout post-apocalyptic horror serial Yesterday’s Gone, literary mind-bender Axis of Aaron, and the blockbuster sci-fi series, Invasion. Never one for staying inside a single box for long, he also writes smart stories for children under the pen name Guy Incognito, and laugh out loud comedies which are absolutely not for children.
He is also the founder of the Sterling & Stone Story Studio and along with partners Johnny B. Truant and David W. Wright hosts the weekly Self-Publishing Podcast, openly sharing his journey as an author-entrepreneur and publisher.
Sean is often spotted taking long walks, eating brisket with his fingers, or watching movies with his family in Austin, Texas. You can find him at www.SterlingAndStone.net.
Johnny B. Truant is the bestselling author of the Invasion series, the political sci-fi thriller The Beam, Fat Vampire, Axis of Aaron, Unicorn Western, and many more fiction titles in addition to the nonfiction bestseller Write. Publish. Repeat.
He is al
so co-owner of the Sterling & Stone Story Studio, and along with partners Sean Platt and David W. Wright hosts the weekly Self-Publishing Podcast, openly sharing his journey as an author-entrepreneur and publisher.
Johnny and his family are thrilled to finally call Austin, Texas their home after far too many years of planning to move and complaining about life in northern Ohio. You can usually find him hanging out at www.SterlingAndStone.net.
For any questions about Sterling & Stone books or products, or help with anything at all, please send an email to [email protected], or contact us at sterlingandstone.net/contact. Thank you for reading.