by Eric Brown
Her double was still blank, to all intents vegetative.
“You might as well have a seat,” Ward said, indicating a cluster of easy chairs in one corner of the room. “We’re looking at a minimum of an hour or two before there’s even the chance of a flicker.”
She was struggling to read him today, the swings between sensitive and surly. She suspected it was mostly in her own, stressed head, part of her complex reaction to this situation.
She went and sat down, running a finger over the wall’s smartsurface to scroll through her messages and pretending she wasn’t doing this to avoid looking at the disturbingly blank features of her double.
Some time later, Ward came and sat with her. “It’s all going smoothly. Imprinting is at about fifty per cent and we’re starting a series of escalating stimuli to tease her into life.”
“Any response?”
He shook his head. “Like I say, don’t expect much. We’re not just flipping a switch here.”
She refused to rise to the bait.
Every so often, as the two sat in silence, she glanced across at her clone. What must it be like to, effectively, be born fully formed, your head full of memories of things you hadn’t actually experienced? What kind of dissonance must that create? Other than her studies with trauma victims this was an entirely new field.
“I get it,” Ward said, after more time had passed. They’d been here three hours now, with no sign of progress. Kat’s clone had been fully imprinted for nearly an hour, and as yet had failed to respond to any stimuli. “I understand why you want to be here,” he continued. “Professional interest, of course, but it’s personal too. But still, you’ve been here, you’ve sat for all this time. Long enough to know just how dull it is. You can leave at any point—no one will judge you. At least if you’re out there in the obs room you can have a coffee and go for a pee.”
“I don’t want to miss anything.”
“It’s all monitored,” Ward said.
“That’s not enough.”
“It’s enough for me. I can’t be present for all eighteen clones as they’re imprinted. I have to monitor it all in the minutest detail, and I can’t imagine my standards are any lower than yours.”
That mix again, the sympathy and sensitivity counterbalanced by sharp digs.
She looked away, at the viewing window, at a nearby screen, and everywhere she looked she saw graphs and readouts, streamed via her carpal implant, the room’s smartsurfaces taunting her with her clone’s lack of brain activity.
She stifled a yawn, surely prompted by Ward’s reference to how dull it was sitting and waiting. She was surprised at how exhausting this was—that boredom, but also the nervous tension, and the constant concentration on readouts and on that blank face, determined to miss nothing.
Some time later, she could no longer repress the yawn, and Ward laughed—sympathetically, she thought.
“Still nothing?” she asked, leaning forward in her seat, her elbows on her knees, her hands clutched together.
Ward shook his head. “It’s the same for all eighteen,” he told her. “A few delta and theta waves in a couple of our subjects, but mostly still nothing.”
“Is that a cause for concern?”
“No, not at all. As I said before, we didn’t really expect anything for a good few hours after imprint. If most of our subjects were stirring and only one or two were still flat, we’d worry, but so far this is all going as anticipated. It’s not really a spectator sport, you know.”
He couldn’t resist throwing in the occasional dig. Kat didn’t really know Ward Richards that well—maybe that was just normal for him.
“So what happens next?”
“We have a whole sequence of programmed stimuli that we’re run-ning through them now,” he said. “It’s a bit like shocking a stopped heart back into action with a defibrillator—you start low, and then bump up the voltage each time. That’s what we’re doing with the stimuli. It’ll all kick in at some point.”
“I had this little scenario in my head,” Kat said. “That I’d watch my clone waking and we’d have some kind of exchange, a dialogue—that I’d be presented with some kind of insight. Stupid, I know. I’ve worked with enough trauma cases to know it’s a slow and gradual process.”
“This is different,” Ward said. “This is you.”
He was right. She’d been reading too much into this, expecting too much. He’d been right to lower her expectations, and it had been sensitive of him to offer her an easy get-out.
“I think I’ll leave it for now,” she said, feeling as if she was admitting failure. “I’ll take a break. Can I access the feeds? I’d like to monitor this as closely as possible, maybe come back and interview my clone before departure. I know my main role is working with the originals left behind, but this is a unique opportunity.”
He shrugged. “To be honest, I and my team could do without the disruption, but I guess you’d just go to Director Patel…”
His words felt like a slap, and she told herself it was just the stress they were all feeling.
“I’m not going to cause trouble,” she said softly as she stood. “Thank you, Ward. I really appreciate this.”
She waited until she was past the airlock and in the decontamination area before letting out the breath she’d been holding. She was tired. She needed a shower, a good strong coffee and, more than anything, a break from Ward Richards’ company.
A short time later she pushed through the swing door into the observation area. Lauren Miekle was talking to Louis, the technician, and—
“Daniel? What are you doing here? I thought…”
The big South African smiled, spreading his arms as if he expected a hug. “Kat,” he said, “I wouldn’t miss this for the world, girl. Two of you?”
She hated how Daniel DeVries could make her blush so readily—even today, after the way he’d behaved last night when he was drunk.
How long had he been here, watching? She glanced through the viewing window at her physical double lying covered only by a thin sheet. Looked back at Daniel, and saw that he was still smiling. Bastard.
Then she realised there was something she’d missed. The way Lauren and Louis had ignored her arrival, were still peering at something on the window’s smartsurface.
“What is it?” she said, brushing past Daniel, who seemed not to have noticed anything either.
Daniel caught up with her, peered at the screen, and then turned. “Looks like you picked just the wrong moment to step out,” he said.
He nodded at what Kat now saw was a graph showing unmistakable repeated oscillations. “Delta waves,” he said. “Looks like Sleeping Beauty’s starting to wake up.”
Not waking, though, but sleeping. Delta waves normally characterised the deepest stages of sleep, but still that was a dramatic step up from the vegetative state which was all her clone had known until now.
Kat glanced at the door. It had only taken her a few minutes to de-suit, but decontaminating to go back in would take far longer.
She looked into her clone’s room. Ward stood over the motionless figure, as if waiting for it to open its eyes. Graphs sprung up on the inside of the window, prompted by Kat’s implant. The lines showed unmistakable signs of brain activity.
She felt Daniel’s hand resting lightly between her shoulder blades, glanced up at him and saw the excitement on his face.
“It’s happening, isn’t it?” she said. “We’re really doing this.”
He looked away, and only now did she realise her faux pas. By ‘we’ she’d meant the entire team, the mission, but Daniel was always going to take it personally: Daniel was on the reserve list.
She leaned into him briefly.
When she looked into the other room again, she saw that Ward had moved back to his seat and had resumed thumbing through data on a screen—feeds from the other clones, perhaps.
“It’s probably still going to be hours,” Daniel said, his hand lingering on her back.
“I should whisk you away, get you something to eat. What do you say?”
She stepped away from him, over to the window. Not yet. She couldn’t go just yet.
The next time he asked, she agreed. An hour had passed, and still her clone was deeply asleep, alternating between periods of mostly delta waves, and then mostly theta.
Kat was exhausted. Lauren had left a while ago, and another technician whose name Kat did not know had replaced Louis.
“Okay,” she said grudgingly. “Maybe some food, some coffee.”
“You’re on, girl!”
She glanced back through the viewing window one last time and that was when it happened.
Ward stood, abruptly, presumably alerted by something in his feed.
Kat looked at her clone, immediately. At first she saw nothing new, but then…Her clone was breathing more rapidly, not the almost imperceptible rise and fall of the chest of one deeply asleep.
Eyes moved beneath their lids. Was her clone dreaming?
Kat moved to the window.
Nothing. The breathing calmed, the eyes stilled.
For a time she even wondered if she might have imagined it, then again she saw the flickering of eyes beneath closed lids, the twitch of a jaw muscle.
Then…
The clone’s eyes opened, stared briefly straight up at the ceiling, and then closed again.
“Did you see that?” gasped Kat.
The eyes opened again, swivelled, and Kat was sure her clone had seen her. The clone twitched, raised her head, propping herself on her elbows, her eyes fixed on Kat.
And smiled.
Kat was intensely aware of the thumping of her heart. This wasn’t quite as she had imagined it would be, but if anything was even more powerful, more magical. The sense of connection was breathtaking.
Her clone was awake, was an individual—no longer an ‘it’, but a ‘she’.
This was it, the moment of dislocation. The moment when the blank canvas became an individual, her other self she was sending to the stars.
Kat pressed a hand against the glass, just as in her many visualisations of the moment when her double came to awareness.
They held eye contact for a second or two more, then the clone let her head settle back again, closed her eyes, and her brain activity returned to that of deep sleep.
¤¤¤
Daniel persuaded her to leave.
She’d waited for more signs of activity, but her clone remained resolutely asleep.
Outside, the cold air bit deep. There had been a dusting of fine, crystalline snow while they’d been inside Unit 7.
Kat hugged herself.
“So why did you come today?” she asked. “You’ve never shown much interest in this side of things.”
“Chance to see you in nothing more than a sheet, girl? I’m surprised they weren’t selling tickets.”
He laughed, but Kat blushed and wanted to hit him. Normally she enjoyed the competitive, innuendo-filled banter with Daniel, but now she was just too tired.
He didn’t pick up on that yet, though. “Thought that sheet was going to fall off when you sat up,” he said.
“Her,” Kat said, her voice tight. “Her, not me.”
“Oh, come on, girl, lighten up, why don’t you?”
“Really?” she said, and only now did he stop, meet her look, his expression sagging as he seemed to realise just how much he’d pissed her off. “Really?”
“Hey,” he said. “A bit of fun, you know? Listen, let me get you lunch and then we can—”
“We can what, Daniel? What exactly are you after?”
She’d had enough of this at the party last night. Drunken men who thought they were in with a chance. Daniel following her out when she left, drunkenly suggesting they go on somewhere together, and then getting surly with her when she refused.
What was it, right now? Was this another manifestation of the project’s tensions, the need for some kind of release? Was she giving off some kind of signal?
“No, Daniel. Just…I need a break, okay? Just leave it, would you?”
She turned and walked away, half-expecting to hear his footsteps hurrying to catch up, but when she looked back he was still standing there, a bemused grin on his features.
Kat pulled her leather jacket tight, cursing that she’d left her bike at Unit 7 and would have to trudge back through the snow for it later, because she certainly wasn’t going back now.
She rounded another corner and almost collided with someone.
“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry. I just…”
Travis Denholme. Thank god for that. Travis was one of the nice guys. Travis was safe. As ever, he was smiling hesitantly and exuding the scent of peppermint pills to which he seemed addicted.
“Are you okay?” he said. He glanced beyond her, and for a moment she thought Daniel must have finally decided to pursue her, but when she looked over her shoulder he wasn’t there.
“Yes,” she said. “Just…It’s been a long day. I’ve been in the Isolation Unit, waiting for my clone to wake.”
“That’s quite something,” Travis said. “Exciting and disturbing in equal measure, I’d imagine. Any progress?”
She smiled. He understood. “She’s starting to stir,” Kat said. “But it’s a slow process.”
“I’d love to hear about it, if you have time?” Travis said. “You must be exhausted. Do you fancy something to eat? Word is that Director Patel has sourced some bioproduce locally, in celebration. It’s over in the techs’ bistro.”
Her first reaction was to shrink away: it was everywhere, the men pursuing her, the hormones running high. Then she felt her shoulders slump. It had been such a long, emotional day, and this was Travis, after all.
“Okay,” she said. “Yes, thank you, that’d be good. I’d like that.”
TRAVIS
KAT LIFTED A FORKFUL OF SALAD TO HER MOUTH AND chewed.
“Well?” he asked.
Her eyes widened. “My God…Where did you say Patel got this?”
“An organic grower in Thetford.” He took a mouthful of tomato and grated carrot. “Hell, it is good.”
He compared this to what he’d been eating for the past few years: factory-farmed meat and hydroponic fruit and veg flown in from Spain, bland and tasteless. The odd thing was, he felt guilty that he was enjoying the meal.
The bistro occupied the very apex of the admin dome and afforded a 360-degree view of the surrounding landscape. The shuttle stood tall at twelve o’clock, rearing against the bleached-out winter sky; at six o’clock, beyond the main gates, were the compounds where the tireless protestors had set up camp. As he stared out across the frost-encrusted tarmac, he saw a BBC outside-broadcast van and technicians preparing for another round of interviews.
A surfacescreen on the far wall broadcast world news: the famine in Indonesia, the coup in Panama, and the aftermath of the Allianz attack on the Bonn spaceport.
“So…” he asked, “how did it go in Unit 7?”
“It was far weirder and…and more dislocating…than I imagined it would be.” She smiled at him, and he felt his stomach flip.
“There it was…there she was. Me, in effect, biologically, psychologically me, with all my memories, habits, faults…Or rather all my memories up until three days ago, that is.” She shrugged her broad shoulders. “And yet it wasn’t me. It didn’t feel like me.”
He frowned. “How did it feel, then?”
It was good to talk with her like this, one to one, over a meal. He’d even suggested they share a white wine, and she said she’d have just one glass as she intended to travel across to her place on the coast that afternoon.
“We never see ourselves as others see us, of course. We never apprehend ourselves as others do. The most obvious example of that is when we hear a recording of our own voice—it doesn’t sound like us, and invariably we loathe what we hear.”
“You mean,” he said, incredulously, “that you loathed what you saw in the
re?”
She laughed. “Of course not. Not loathed. But I did wonder if…”
“Go on.”
“If I were jealous of my clone.” She took a mouthful of food and chewed, and Travis just stared at her jaw as it worked. Christ, he could watch her all day. He shook himself mentally and said, “Jealous?”
“There it was…There she was—me—off to the stars to work with the specialist team on resuscitation. Breaking new ground. She’ll be encountering states of mind among the specialists that I could only guess at. It was fascinating, just watching her come to consciousness…” She took a sip of wine, then went on, “Of course, I couldn’t even begin to explain to Ward what I was feeling, even if he’d been in the slightest bit interested.”
“How was he? I noticed his marked reluctance last night to letting you observe.”
“I wish I knew where I stood with him. One second he can be as nice as pie, the next sarky and cutting.”
“Join the club,” Travis said. “If you want my opinion, he has an inflated idea of his own genius. He thinks his specialism is way more important than anyone else’s.”
“Well, word is that he is a bit special.”
He shrugged, hung his fork before his mouth, and said, “Word is often wrong, Kat. He talks himself up, and has his underlings in the palm of his hand. And do you know what I heard?”
“Go on.”
“This is between me and you. I wouldn’t want it getting back to Miekle.”
Kat leaned forward, grinning. “What is it? You’re making me feel like some co-conspirator in a bad holo-drama.”
“You know that Ward worked with the Bonn team before he was seconded here a couple of years back? Well, I had it from an ecologist at Bonn that his work wasn’t as cutting edge as he liked people to think, and that he was riding on the coat-tails of the clone specialist over there, Dr Mannheim. Word is he riled Mannheim, who got him booted out.”
“That’s news to me.”
“But that’s not all. I’ve heard that the only reason he got this posting was because he was Miekle’s lover. She pulled the strings, and when Dr Tyler retired, Ward stepped in and took up the reins.”