He looked at her for a few moments and then answered. ‘We had strong reason to believe that Mister MacFarlane was not a safe individual to be around. We had strong reason to believe that his wife and daughter were in immediate danger.’
‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘I’m willing to accept that we may have made the wrong decision in hindsight, but I am not willing to accept that we made the wrong decision with the information we had available to us at the time.’
‘What information was that?’
‘We had evidence that places Mister MacFarlane at the site of the murder of the Kirby family.’
‘That’s impossible,’ I said. ‘I was at home with my wife that night.’
Emma turned to me and carefully, quietly and loaded with threats, said to me, ‘Only say something if I tell you I need you to answer it.’
‘Okay.’
She nodded curtly and turned her attention back towards Byrne. ‘You heard him.’
‘We have evidence to the contrary. And if he was present at the crime scene of Tony Kirby, that makes him a serious suspect considering the links between his murder and the murder of Sarah Simone. Add on top of that the fact that Mister MacFarlane was an employee of OpTex Drop Clinics at the time of the IDRoPS procedures that Betsy Moore and Steve Millar went through, as well as Susie Ennis —’
‘Wait,’ I said, looking at Emma. She and Byrne looked at me. ‘I saw her name when I was searching for information, but I never treated her. I checked. I’ve never seen that name before.’
‘Her surname was Quitely at the time she went to OpTex, Mister MacFarlane,’ Byrne said. ‘We’ve checked, and she definitely went to the same clinic, which sounds like quite the coincidence, wouldn’t you say?’
‘What kind of evidence do you have that places my client near the crime scene?’ Emma asked.
‘We have a recording of his presence there.’
‘What kind of recording?’
‘The building he lived in was on a street with video recording along the highway. We have footage of Mister MacFarlane walking in the direction of the Kirby’s house before the murder and also on the way back after the murder.’
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
‘Can we see the footage?’ Emma asked.
‘Certainly,’ Byrne said and pressed a button on the desk.
A projector slid down from the ceiling along with a screen on the wall near us. After a minute, it started showing the footage. The quality was perfect and every detail could be seen.
It felt unreal watching it, but I saw myself walking, just as they said. The recording also had sound, but nobody was talking. I could, however, hear the footsteps.
I looked at Emma, who was trying very hard not to look shocked.
‘And you’re sure about the time this was recorded?’ she asked Byrne. Her manner continued to be cool, but I thought I could pick up on just a small note of uncertainty in her voice.
‘It’s regularly maintained,’ he said. ‘Top of the line. We’ve had our technicians look it over, and there’s been no tampering, and there are no signs of any faults.’
The footage looped over and started again. I looked at it, and suddenly realised what was wrong with the picture I was staring at.
‘That’s not me,’ I said.
‘Damn it, what did I just tell you?’ Emma snapped at me, and I involuntarily jumped back a little.
‘Sorry!’ I said. ‘But that isn’t me!’
‘It’s quite blatantly you,’ Byrne said. ‘How on earth are you —’
‘Look at the way he’s walking,’ I said. ‘He’s not limping. I shattered my ankle eleven years ago and I’ve walked with a slight limp since then. It’s in my medical records.’
Emma looked at Byrne again. ‘He’s telling the truth,’ she said. ‘He’s had that limp all the time I’ve known him.’
‘But that guy,’ I ignored Emma glaring at me one more time. ‘That guy isn’t limping. That’s not me.’
‘Assuming for a moment that you might be telling the truth,’ Byrne said. ‘Who is it?’
Every night when I go out,
The monkey’s on the table …
I tried to get my breathing under control, but everything from eleven years ago was suddenly striking me in the chest. I was trying to avoid a panic attack.
I thought it had all been over. Thought that I’d never see him again. I honestly thought he had been destroyed.
Take a stick and knock it off.
Pop goes the weasel.
‘He’s my clone,’ I said.
Chapter Eight
Eleven years ago, I’d beenin a particularly bad place. I was depressed, suicidal, drug addicted and an alcoholic. I was heading straight towards my own death. It was a spiral that would have been majestic had it not been so pathetic.
I resisted everything that I could. Any time anyone tried to help me, I pushed them away.
Until I was referred for an experimental string of medical tests.
The rules for cloning have since become much more severe but at the time, it was verging on ‘anything goes’. People were experimenting, and nowhere more than the medical community.
It started off being seen as a good thing. A certain amount of sense exists in that. After all, if you want to test various opportunities, what better way to do it than on the same person? You can test for side effects, you can test what works best and you have a control subject that is absolutely identical throughout the tests.
For years, it was just the physical side of tests that were created. Someone was cloned, but in an inert way. A completely blank personality. A disposable human. Photocopies.
The problem with medical testing is that it’s expensive and the pharmaceutical companies are generally looking for ways to do things more cheaply. As a result, some of the clones were created more haphazardly. They were just looking for specific reactions, so it didn’t always need to be an exact copy, as long as the parts that were being tested were correct.
So if you were testing veins or muscles, you didn’t need to worry quite as much about the density of bone structure. If you were testing digestive abilities, you didn’t need to be quite as worried about dexterity. The most common side effect of cheap cloning was a highly dense bone structure, which I have to admit I was always jealous of. During the testing, I slipped on a flight of stairs and severely damaged my ankle, leading to the limp I’ve been left with for over a decade.
Quality control was not considered an issue. Nor were ethics.
They were looking for ways to investigate effects of various drugs that would attempt to battle addictive or suicidal tendencies. They also wanted to test intensive therapy and memory repression, along with electro-shock therapy. They needed a test subject and I was deemed to be perfect.
I was given the choice whether I wanted to apply or not. I said yes, because I didn’t really have anything to lose. I knew what was happening with my life and the idea of trying to almost literally become someone else appealed a lot.
But they wanted a control subject. So they created a clone of me. My brain patterns were scanned and downloaded and grafted onto the clone as well. They kept us in as identical surroundings as possible, with identical experiences.
Most of the finance of the experiment went towards that. They controlled it incredibly tightly throughout the year I spent with them.
They closed off aspects of my memory. Parts of my childhood. Parts of my learning. Some of it was left blank and some of it was replaced with implanted memories. And then they’d try a new round of medication. Then they’d tweak it again.
I was assigned to a Doctor Carey, who spent most of the time with me repeatedly going through my childhood. Over that period of time he effectively brainwashed me. And then I would be subjected to intensive memory integration, removing specific areas of my own memories and replacing them with others. Replacing my difficult memories with more sedate ones.
It was intens
ive. It was long. It was difficult. It was frequently painful. But removed from many of my own choices, I quickly became institutionalised, which suited me surprisingly well.
These new memories were the cause of a lot of my angry inclinations, and a lot of my self-destructive tendencies. I was grateful to be relieved of them.
When I thought of it later, I had l difficulties with some of the choices that were taken when I was in a vulnerable position. I had difficulties with my treatment as a human being. However, I couldn’t deny that it had only been beneficial to me in the long run. I had large memory gaps and that included a lot of my treatment. I had undoubtedly been mistreated, but it wasn’t something I remembered much of.
My clone, on the other hand, did not respond quite as well. He was going through the same medication but without the memory tweaks and he responded angrily and occasionally violently.
I heard most of this second hand and after the fact. We were kept separate. I never met him.
After about a year, the testing facility was raided by the police, and a number of the experiments were judged to be active cruelty and ignorant of quality of life.
The majority of the clones involved were humanely put down. I had spent over a decade under the impression that mine was amongst them. He had been irrational, angry and violent.
I was obviously wrong.
Human cloning had been judged to be unethical and illegal since then, in the United States at least. It was apparently rife in some parts of the world, but there were less than a few hundred live clones in the United States and the majority of those were registered. An unregistered clone was someone who lived between the gaps. Unable to use bank accounts, hospitals … they could only exist almost entirely off the radar.
It turned out that mine was one of them.
I explained all of this to Detective Byrne and Emma, and pointed out that my time in the testing facility was a matter that was recorded and in the public domain.
I was still under custody but this was something that Byrne told me that he would investigate properly and quickly.
For the time being, I was going to remain in jail.
Chapter Nine
The more I thought about it, the more I realised that I needed to do something. My wife and child were still at home, and someone was trying to tear my life apart. It stood to reason that they were targets.
If I waited for Emma to work through the legalities and try to get me freed on parole, it could be too late. And while Byrne appeared to be doing his best to be fair, I didn’t fancy my chances of getting a fast result from his investigation, especially considering how good my clone had to be in order to remain under the radar for this long.
In fact, the more I thought about it, the more one thing stood out to me.
He knew where that camera was. He knew that it would frame me. He’d made sure the police would see it explicitly rather than just relying on them making the connection about the victims being my patients. He’d knowingly placed me there. He knew that I would be the link between all of the murders, and he had been willing to kill people in order to put me exactly where I was right now.
I called for the guard, and begged to see Byrne again. I could feel panic surging up to my chest, threatening to strangle me.
And then I waited.
And waited.
And each time I asked, and I begged, they told me he’d be there soon. No matter what I said, no matter how much I tried to explain to them what was going on, they just kept calmly telling me that he was on his way, and there was no point making a fuss.
Eventually, he came and stood outside my cell, speaking to me through the viewing panel only.
‘Please, you need to protect my family,’ I said. ‘Please, send someone there. He’s out there … my clone. He’s going to go after them, I know it. Please.’
He looked at me, not reacting until I’d finished pleading. Just staring at me. I could feel the anger sparking off him.
‘We checked your story out,’ he said. ‘Your clone died in the facility eleven years ago.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘There must be some —’
‘And as far as I’m concerned, we’ve done the best thing we could possibly do for your family,’ he said. ‘We put you in here. Away from them.’
‘No,’ I shouted, slamming my fists on the door. ‘No! Please!’
He shut the viewing panel, and I staggered back to my bed, collapsing onto it in a heap. Frustrated, I stopped for a few moments and tried to work out my options, but I could only see one. I needed to take things into my own hands. At the very least, I needed to be able to contact Rachel.
Chapter Ten
My cell was not large. It was not, to be fair, uncomfortable but it was not large. I had a bed and I had a small toilet behind a partition for privacy, although my feet and upper torso were constantly visible – there wasn’t even space to crouch behind it. I had a sink and I had enough floor space to pace back and forth a little but not much.
Everything was taken from me other than my clothes, and they took my belt and laces as well just to complete that. Nothing in my pockets. Everything was emptied.
Everything except my clothes.
And my eyes.
One of the most interesting things about being one of the people to design the software behind IDRoPS is that I knew how to do things with the technology that most people didn’t. And I had an earlier version of the hardware than most people.
Yes, we’d tracked down everyone with the early versions of the hardware that could transmit, and we removed them. Every last one of them.
Unless you were part of the team that designed the hardware.
It wasn’t something I used. But it was something that I had access to.
Especially since there was an extra hack with the technology that not many people knew about.
The in-eye menu wasn’t only controlled by the watch unit. It wasn’t only remote.
You could also access it by manipulating the eye.
People knew a few commands for it. Double tapping the front, for example, selected a function. But there were certain fail safes. This was why you had to go back to an optometrist in order to reset the commands if your watch unit was damaged.
To reset it, you had to access the rest of the eye. This meant popping it from the socket. This wasn’t as dangerous as it sounded, because the solidity of the eye had been increased by the IDRoPS.
Only optometrists knew how to do it and obviously nobody was crazy enough to try and perform it on themselves. They’d be spending too long trying to guess what they were doing.
But if you knew your way around it by touch, then even if you were used to doing it to other people all you had to do was know what to look for with your hands in the wrong positions.
That and be willing to do it.
I waited until the middle of the night before I gouged my eyes out.
Chapter Eleven
Pulling my eyes out was an interesting experience and although it was uncomfortable, it was not as painful as I’d feared. It was strange and fascinating having a field of vision that was separate to my head as they hung down, and it was uncomfortable being unable to blink while handling them to get the menu back online, but the sturdiness of the eye was resilient enough to allow me to push them back in relatively easily.
Once I had the menu back online and functioning, I could navigate it via the main control menu, which involved a mixture of manipulating the front of the eye, while also looking in particular directional sequences.
It was clumsy and it was awkward, but it worked. After being used to a more elegant system, it was also time consuming, which meant that I had to work quickly to re-familiarise myself with the controls as quickly as possible.
The transmit options would only go so far, unfortunately. While I could use it to receive messages from the cloud, I couldn’t send messages that way. That had been a later feature and one that hadn’t been compatible, as it had only been function
al via the control unit. I could, however, read the messages that Rachel had sent me until she found out that I wasn’t able to receive them.
And then, within the last few hours, there had been three more messages that changed everything.
The first one was just two words, but the punctuation made me stop.
HELLO ‘JOHN’
She’d never send anything like that. Block capitals, and the strange quotation marks. That wasn’t her writing. That was someone else using her to send a message.
The next one was a picture message. It was a picture of me holding Natalie tight. She was struggling and trying to get away, but I was obviously stronger than she was. I was smiling and staring at the camera.
And I was holding a knife.
What had Rachel been thinking when ‘I’d’ got into the house? Had she thought it was me? Had she known instantly that it wasn’t? She knew about the past and about the cloning in the first place, but she, like me, thought that he was dead. Did she think she was watching me, insane and violent, threatening my daughter? Threatening her? Forcing her to send messages?
She had to know now. The message didn’t make any sense otherwise. She had to know who he was. That was something at least, but it didn’t help me much right now.
What would Natalie be thinking? She didn’t know about it and it was a concept I didn’t know she’d fully understand. From her point of view, I would just be doing this and threatening her.
The thought made me sick. She must be so frightened.
The next message came through with coordinates. Somewhere to meet. And it just had one word with it.
ALONE
I was scared. Very scared. I knew how violent and how angry I had been in my youth and if this was a version of me that had never lost those aspects of myself, then he was capable of anything.
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