by Mara, Alex
People. I jotted this down, even as my mind swam. He perceived clones and humans in the same way.
All the previous incarnations had talked about clones as clones, and humans as humans. For him, no divide existed. “Sometimes,” I said.
“Do you look at them as you talk to them?” he asked. That was amusement, teasing, delivered with a perfect, subtle inflection.
My face shot up, and his eyes crinkled at the corners. He knew the effect of his speech and understood my reactions—all basics an infiltrator would learn by his fourth day.
But this kind of ribbing showed an understanding of nuances that most didn't acquire until after their seduction training. “Usually,” I said, forcing myself to keep my eyes on him.
“Do I make you uncomfortable, Darcy West?”
Yes, he definitely knew what he was doing. "You know there's no camera in here to observe you," I said slowly. "Don't you?"
His shoulders lifted once, fell back. "You designed us to analyze every room we walk into."
“If there was one in here, you would be toeing the line, like you've been doing since we talked that morning."
“I’ve been good. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
I lifted my stenopad, my eyes flicking over his stats. "You're certainly good with guns and tantos."
"Who is that?" he interjected.
When I looked up, his focus was across the room—fixed on the portrait of Zara by my bed.
I paused, regretting that, given space constraints in this facility, I had to use my living space as an office as well. "My sister."
"You love her," he said simply.
My throat tightened. "What makes you say that—aside from the obvious familial relationship?"
"You keep her next to your bed. When you fall asleep, you see her. When you wake up, you see her."
My thumb pressed and unpressed the pen’s nib. Who was evaluating who? But his observations told me things, too—important things. I had begun to see the personality inside 8024, the particular edges of him. He took his time. He was thoughtful.
“You're right,” I admitted. “You’re unique from the rest of your model.”
“I know,” he said, his fingers rubbing the hairs of his opposite forearm. My eyes were drawn like moths; his fingertips looked warm, supple. I imagined them stroking my arm in the same way. “I knew it as soon as I woke. That was why I asked you what I am.”
"And have you figured that out?"
His eyes narrowed a little. "Have you?"
I was caught a moment. What was he asking me? Whether I had figured out what I was? What was I? Doctor, woman, human.
His voice carried into my thoughts. "You thought I was turning the question around on you."
I blinked, focused on him. "Were you?"
"I want you to interpret the question however you like. What are you then, Dr. West?"
I lifted my pen, tipped it toward him. "I'm doing the evaluation, 8024."
"Fair enough." He spread his hands. "So have you evaluated what I am?"
I sighed, swiveled a few degrees to observe the forest scene, where snow had begun to fall in large, feathery flakes. But instead of cold, my skin tingled with warmth.
“I don’t know what you are,” I said. “I haven’t figured it out yet. You behave with unprecedented autonomy. Your emotions don’t seem to be imitations of your training, and if they are, you’re the first of eight thousand of your type to completely fool me.”
“They’re not—imitations, that is,” he said from behind me. His voice had gone husky and low, and when I glanced back, his eyes bore a look of keen honesty. “What does that mean for me?”
Recycling. But I couldn't bear to tell him about Ides's threat. “It means I’ll be watching you closely to see how you evolve.”
“You aren’t speaking the truth, Darcy West,” he said, and when my brow knit, he added: “You started rubbing your eyes when you spoke.”
Lie detection training. Of course—it was one of the first sessions. I closed my eyes, let out a breath. When I opened them, 8024 was standing over me, so close I caught a whiff of his scent. His pupils were large as coins, edging out the green irises.
One of his big hands reached out, a feather stroke on my cheek. His touch felt like a brand, and I jerked back. “Shit,” I said, the wheels of my chair echoing over the metal as I rolled backward. “What are you doing?”
“Calming you. Your behavior indicated stress,” he said, and he bore the faintest trace of two straight lines between his sharp eyebrows.
Some small, unrestrained part of me wanted to touch those eyebrows, press the hairs along his brow bone.
All of his behavior was part of his programming. He was designed to do this. It was supposed to feel real. I reminded myself of this like a mantra, tried to slow my heart. It was no good.
“Please go back to your seat,” I whispered. Go back to your seat before I ask you to do that again.
He nodded, returned to his straddle on the chair opposite me. And as he moved away, it felt as though an invisible wire were stretching taut between us.
Even from across the desk, his pull wasn’t any less potent. “I've been honest with you. I hope you’ll be truthful with me, Darcy West.”
And the way he'd said it—low, vulnerable—sent a frisson up my back and neck.
Those words weren’t quite a command, but they weren’t subservience, either. His speech was compelling, and I found myself wanting to do as he asked, even as I understood the power behind his technique.
But he'd given me honesty. I could see it in his eyes. And I didn't want him to die.
“This facility isn’t tolerant of aberrance,” I said. "Once I report to Ides about everything you've done over the past few days, he'll have you recycled. No question."
That was the truth.
He nodded. “Understood.”
And with that, his whole form shifted, his face reforming itself into the sweet adulation I had experienced from every other incarnation of the infiltrator model.
He stood to turn the chair around, sat with his back at the rest, his hands folding in his lap. His body seemed composed of eerily exact angles, almost robotic. “Ready to be evaluated, Doctor.”
In a moment, he had become just like the rest of them.
But he was nothing like the rest of them. Already 8024 could shift chameleon-like from charming and suave to vulnerable and soft, from an assassin into a man who wanted, who needed.
He could be anything, anyone. But each of those things revolved around a firm core, an immutable center. "Who am I?" he'd asked, but within just a few days, he seemed to know himself better than any clone, and most humans. It was terrifying and alluring all at once.
My heart cinched tight in my chest as I thought to myself, just like that: If he was the one, I needed to give this man more time. I needed to save him from an early end.
* * *
7:15 p.m.
"This is uncommon, Dr. West," said Ides, whose nose was set to a rare white-and-purple orchid bloom. "Smell this one."
"Sir," I said, gripping my stenopad, "I'm supposed to oversee another waking in fifteen minutes, but first I really wanted to talk to you about—"
He straightened, his white hair fluttering as he did. At his full height, the man dwarfed me. "Oh, just smell it, West."
I leaned down and set my nose to the orchid's bloom. It had no fragrance, but for some reason I felt reluctant to pull away from it. For a second I could have forgotten where we were, what we were doing. "I don't smell anything."
"Yes, we've designed it scentless." He fingered the flower. "What do you think of its appearance?"
"Beautiful," I said, because it was.
"Beautiful is one word." Ides offered a pitying half-smile, set his thumb and forefinger to the blossom and plucked it right from the stem.
"Why—?" I gasped.
"Do you feel it yet?" he asked, twirling the bloom between his fingers. "The tiredness behind your eye
s?"
Now that he'd mentioned it, I did. My eyelids were sagging, though a moment ago I'd been wired with anticipation and anxiety. "Yes." And I understood. "It's been engineered as a drug, hasn't it?"
"Well, yes. They all have." He swept his hand around the greenhouse dome and over the flowers and fruit trees and vegetable plants. "But some of them—this one, for instance—are special."
I blinked hard against the drowsiness.
"Quite potent, isn't it?" he said, rubbing his own eyes. "And you just had a sniff. You can imagine its effects when ground up and filtered into a pure dose."
"Lovely." I tried to sound sincere, but my sarcasm was probably showing.
"Lovely and deadly. Just like your infiltrators. Now tell me what it is you want to say."
I jerked my head against the sleepiness as Ides started walking, his eyes on the apple trees ahead.
I fell into step with him. "Sir, you gave me five days to observe infiltrator 8024. He was behaving anomalously."
"Ahh, right. I see your head's still intact."
I quickened my pace to put myself a little ahead, and I half-turned toward him. "Sir, he's...remarkable. He doesn't just imitate—he is. As far as I can tell, he acts and feels according to his own moral code. He's done things in the trainings that are unprecedented."
Ides paused, touching a half-ripe apple. "What's the upshot, West?"
I stopped, took a breath. "He might be the one."
The gray eyes flicked up to me. "What do you mean, 'the one'?"
"The one we've been trying for five years to create. He'll protect us."
Ides faced me in full and his arms folded. The sleeves of his white jacket fluttered under a vent. "What has he done that's so unprecedented?"
"When I woke him, he asked what he was. He didn't comply as the rest do—he asked me a question that demonstrated total self-awareness."
Ides nodded, a jerk of the head. "I'm pretty dubious about that, West. We want them asking where the target is, not staring at their own navels. What else?"
"He set a new record for the obstacle training by using the sticky pads on his feet and activating his claws. None of the others have had that kind of problem-solving impulse, especially not on the fly. And the claws, well...that's just extraordinary."
"He took his shoes off and grew his nails, and he's 'the one'?"
I nodded. "You have to understand that we haven't even sent 5% of the model through to the aviary, and he's still in his first week."
"Doctor," Ides said slowly, "this case is so cut-and-dried, I'm amazed you even brought it to me. He's not your 'one'—he's a complete liability. I'd recycle him myself if I had a spare minute."
A beat of silence followed, which expanded around us in the greenhouse dome until all I heard were the ventilators. Here we were, surrounded by beauty and life, discussing death. As simple and effortless a thing as pinching a bloom from its stem.
I tried to keep my cool, tried not to let the desperation slip in. "Sir, that would be a terrible mistake."
"You mean like the eight thousand mistakes you've made already?"
That stung. “And what exactly is it that you’re looking for?”
“A soldier.” He didn’t even miss a beat. “One who will do as we ask with ultimate professionalism. No anomalies, no surprises. We don’t want a weapon we can’t keep a grip on, Darcy.”
A weapon. He wanted an object, not a person. I felt the familiar impulse to slap him, but before I'd realized it, I had reached out to touch his arm. "Sir," I said, "please. I really believe we're onto something with 8024.”
And when our eyes met, I realized for the first time that I had power over him. Ides's eyes flitted from my face to my chest and back up again. You fool, Darcy. All these years you could have done this.
"All right," he said, "I'll let you keep your toy. But you're still not off the clock. Send him through the seduction module, and report to me in my cabin when he comes out the other side."
"In your cabin?"
One fat white eyebrow raised. "Yes, West. I hate it when you repeat my words."
Inside, my internal organs might have been eating themselves. On the outside, I forced the worst smile of my life. I nodded and turned to go.
"And West?" Ides said behind me.
I looked around.
Ides bent to inspect a budding carnation, his focus already elsewhere. "If he doesn't pass the seduction module, he's done."
Eight
Wednesday, May 6, 2053
3:38pm
Blaze
Scarlet had accelerated me through the training program. Which meant I was late for my introduction to seduction, but I didn’t change my pace down the hall.
I didn’t care; Darcy West had confirmed it: they planned to recycle me. I just didn’t know when.
I could behave more “normal” than normal, but it wouldn’t matter. Once I’d been slated to go—as I’d seen happen with 8017 and 8018—nothing I did would make a difference. Not docility, not shouting, not crying.
And there was no way I’d cry for them.
I'd understood then, sitting in her office, that I wasn’t human to them—I was a clone. In fact, I was less than that: I’d been engineered for a single purpose, and failing that, I became useless.
If Darcy West had been honest with me when I asked her that first question—what am I?—she would have told me as much.
But she hadn’t been, and she couldn’t be. It was too desolate a truth, one that would likely induce depression, existential despair. My model had been designed resilient—I sensed resilience in me, at least—but on my first day of life, I didn’t even know if I would have been able to handle hearing such a truth.
Still, the way she’d looked at me across that desk, once we did finally meet eyes, wasn’t the way someone would look at a weapon.
Darcy looked at me like we were equals, like I was human as much as her—and maybe that was why it had taken her so long to raise her eyes to mine.
She knew it was wrong. She knew what I really was. "You're different," she'd said. But in so many ways, all of us in this facility were alike: we were people.
I was a man. I had a name. And I was going to be killed. She must have had a hell of a time sleeping through all those recyclings, all those deaths. Probably she’d had to put her morals so far aside she couldn’t even see them anymore.
I didn’t know why she’d taken up this ruthless line of work—something about what was going on aboveground, and the creatures we were meant to be fighting—but after that day 8017 fell, I knew she was still good in spite of it. I could see it in her eyes, hear it in her voice. She wanted to do the right thing.
I was still feeling my interaction with her as I stepped into the seduction training room.
“Welcome, 8024,” said Scarlet—the opposite of Darcy, red-haired and green-eyed and sultry. And just now she was posed with one hand on hip so as to muddle my mind, to quicken my blood, but she had no effect on me.
Looking at her, I could only think that some of us served another purpose: to bring the other clones up to speed. I wondered how old she was. Two months? Three? A full and glorious six months old? “You’re late,” she said. “Always testing my goodwill.”
Around her, five capsules were already sealed and running.
I crossed to the only vacant capsule. “I know,” I said, sitting on the foam. “You going to have me recycled?”
A smile quirked her full lips. She folded her arms, stepped up to me. She stood close enough I could feel the heat off her, but her scent held no appeal. “You’ve got some big balls for a rookie, 8024.”
I lifted my face, met her eyes. Here stood a perfect specimen, what humans would call a “dime,” as I’d learned during colloquialisms training. And I wanted nothing more than to be back in Darcy West’s office, watching her stare at her desk, her small feet fidgeting beneath, that lazy eye turning a few degrees off-center.
“The biggest,” I said.
&nb
sp; One of her hands went out, traced the side of my jaw. Her voice lowered a few decibels. “I could give you a better introduction to women than this simulation. A preview of the next part of the seduction module.”
And, knowing I was going to my end within the week, for a moment I considered it: one experience of real, human pleasure. I could close my eyes and pretend she was someone else, someone who did move my blood.
Even if we were caught, it wouldn’t make a difference to my fate: I was still slated to die. But at least I’d die having felt a woman’s touch.
Even if it wasn’t the woman I wanted.
Darcy’s face appeared in my mind, clarified my thoughts. When my mouth opened, the word that came out was the only word in my head. “No,” I said, and I lay back in the capsule and depressed the button to seal it.
The door slid shut, and Scarlet stared down at me, her lips parted. I knew that expression: shock. I hid my amusement as she disappeared behind the length of white metal.
I lay in silence as the training initialized, the telescreen warming up. I had been wrong about never going unseen: here, in the thirty seconds I had been gifted, no one could see my face. No one could hear my voice. The capsule created a perfect seal outside which no sound escaped.
So I opened my mouth and allowed out what I’d been holding inside since the moment Darcy West had told me I’d be recycled.
For thirty seconds, I let the scream gutter up out of my throat. I felt the strength of my vocal chords, the depth of my lungs.
My hands balled at my sides, my fingers digging into my palms. For the first time, I heard my fighting cry, the sound I’d make if I were ready to kill to live. My life coursed inside me, hot and primal, and I would have done anything, anything to preserve it.
I stopped when I ran out of air, when silverfish swam in my vision. My ears rang with the echoes of my scream, and my throat felt chafed and raw. My hands hurt from how hard I’d gripped them.
It was worth it.
A second after I’d finished, the simulation began. “Welcome to the seduction training module,” a female voice said, as though I hadn’t just poured my lungs out into that capsule. “This module has been divided into three parts: anatomy, techniques of seduction, and simulation.”