Twig

by wildbow

  Now they were coming.

  “Do what you have to,” I said. “But know that whatever you do, the moment you go home to fulfill your last order, you’ll be a statistic to the puppeteer, and nothing more. You’ll revert to the instructions he gave you, and in the midst of it, you’ll be completely and utterly alone.”

  The expression in her face went cold. Angry. A killer’s eyes. I believed her, that she didn’t have an iota of mercy in her when it really came down to it. Her world had been reduced to her and her creator.

  “In the meantime, Mary, keep in mind that there are others like you out there. Including me, at least until you pull that trigger.”

  The best way to lie was to believe the lie. Not that I was lying, but the idea connected to the next.

  The best way to surprise someone was to be surprised as well.

  The door smashed into the room with a force that sent me from my seat at its base to the center of the room.

  Gordon pushed aside the remnants of the door. It looked as though he’d dislocated his shoulder, from the way he held his arm.

  Mary, holding the gun, seemed momentarily caught between finishing me off while I lay two feet from her and dealing with the boy that was half-again her size and apparently capable of throwing himself through a door.

  She decided in the same instant Gordon moved. The pistol wheeled on him, and he threw himself between the wall and the furnace. The bullet flashed where it hit the edge of the furnace.

  She spent five shots in total, and then aimed at me. I covered my face.

  I heard the bullet, but didn’t feel it.

  She reached to the table to seize the hatchet, and moved toward me.

  Taking me hostage with a hatchet? She was careful enough to sharpen it.

  That would be ideal, but the others wouldn’t let her do it. There were benefits to acting alone, I supposed.

  Instead, I pointed at Gordon.

  He was already emerging from behind the furnace. She heaved the weapon at him, an expert motion, sending handle spinning over axehead. He ducked back behind the furnace for cover, while the axe struck the wall right where his head had been.

  She leaped over my legs on her way to the coal chute, throwing the door open.

  Gordon moved to follow.

  I heard a rasp.

  “Nope!” I called out. Non-sequitur, but it was what my brain produced in the moment.

  Gordon paused.

  Fire appeared within the chute.

  Our golden boy kicked the chute door closed before the fire could touch the pile of coal at the chute’s base.

  Leaving Mary to make her well-planned escape.

  I let my head sink back to rest against the floor. Above me, at the doorway, I could see the others standing on either side of the door, peering into the room.

  “What did you get from her?” Helen asked.

  “How are you doing, Sy?” I asked, injecting plenty of sarcasm into my voice, “How did you do it, Sy? Are you okay?”

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What did you get from her?” she asked, again.

  I sighed.

  Gordon offered me a hand in getting to my feet.

  “I think she’s vat grown,” I said. “When pressed, the first thing that popped into her head was a person grown in a bottle. That’s where I’d lay my money.”

  “Vat grown?” Gordon asked. “Made from scratch? No, that would be next to impossible, if they’re supposed to resemble the kids they ended up replacing.”

  I nodded. “Clones. Possibly with implanted behaviors. Probably something plugged in for imprinting to their creator and a reversal of the typical love for your parents.”

  “We can work with that as a starting point,” Jamie said.

  “We have a lot to work with,” I said, looking down at the mark the bullet had made in the floor when she’d fired at me.

  Too far away to be anything but a deliberate miss.

  Previous Next

  Taking Root 1.8

  “You’re bleeding,” Lillian noted, touching my chin.

  “Someone shoved a door into me,” I said, glancing back at Gordon.

  “You’re welcome,” Gordon said.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate the rescue. The sentiment, anyway.”

  Now it was his turn to shoot me a look. I was going to say something, but Lillian grabbed my chin, lifting it up. She patted at it with a pad that smelled like something burnt.

  “We almost missed you,” Jamie said. “We went to the yard, then we were going to split up from there. I didn’t think you’d be straight down from the dorm room.”

  “I saw the smoke at the chimney,” Gordon said. “I thought it was the kitchen, but Jamie knew the layout better than I did, and we found our way down here.”

  “Good as my memory might be, I’m not in top form when I’ve just woken up. We went to the wrong end of the hall. There are multiple furnaces for different sections of the building.”

  Slow to get things moving, I thought.

  “I feel terrible I almost fucked up,” Jamie said. “It would have been better to follow you first, then gone to get Gordon.”

  “They would have seen you and adjusted the plan,” I said. “This would have gone worse if it was the two of us instead of just me.”

  “How’s that?” Gordon asked.

  “She could have hurt Jamie to pressure me, or done it the other way around. Being alone, I could build a rapport.”

  “You could have gotten shot,” Jamie said.

  “When push came to shove, she missed. I think there was a reason she missed.”

  “More than her being pressed for time?” Jamie asked.

  I nodded. “She’s been imprinted with set behaviors, but she’s still human, with hopes and fears. Right now, she’s uncertain, very possibly more than she’s ever been in her whole life. Her creator more or less had a monopoly on how she behaved. Grow a child in a vat, imprint them with behaviors that fit the grand plan, stick them in school to surround them with people to mimic and model themselves after, step in now and again to reinforce, shape behavior and train. I’m the first real challenge to her reality. I’ve got her questioning things.”

  “You make me question my reality,” Gordon said.

  “Ha ha,” I said. Lillian examined my hands, turning them face-up. She had to squint to see, but she put the powder on the bases of my palms, where I’d scuffed them on the floor during my fall.

  “What’s the next step?” Jamie asked.

  “Sy’s call,” Gordon said.

  “I gave her ideas and things to worry about. I don’t think she’s going to check in with her compatriots here. It would increase the chance of running into us a second time.”

  “You don’t think she’s confident about their abilities?” Gordon asked. “She threw that hatchet like a pro.”

  “She’s confident in her abilities. But that’s not where I hit her. It’s called dissonance. You believe one thing deeply enough that it’s central to your identity. Then something, me, steps in to challenge that belief. It’s a hell of a leap of faith to go from believing something and understanding how much of the world works, to saying ‘I don’t know’. Some deny, and you can get stupid-as-hell behaviors from those who see something plain as day but deny it because it conflicts with something they believe. Some get angry, some distract themselves until they can figure out how to deal with it… but very few will turn around and throw themselves headlong into more questions. More dissonance.”

  “If she’s not going to her old friends—” Jamie started.

  “Which would force her to face the questions,” I cut in.

  “Or coming after us—”

  “Risks even more questions,” I added.

  Jamie frowned at my interruptions. “She’s going another place, another route. Who is she? How does she operate? Will she try to escape her worries by fulfilling her mission?”

 
“I told her that if she tries, she might well lose herself to her imprinted behaviors. I don’t think so. She’ll want answers, I think we should track her and get some answers for ourselves.”

  “She just covered her trail pretty well there,” Gordon said. “Is it even possible?”

  “It’s possible,” I said. “We know where she’s going. She’s going to pay a visit to her creator.”

  “Which would be great if we knew who he was,” Jamie said.

  “It would,” I said. “It’s not going to be in the school. If it was another kind of project, maybe it could be hidden, but if I’m right, and these are clones grown in tubes, then it’s too big a task. Even ignoring that, she’s trained. That takes time, and it takes space. You need room to swing weapons around or practice your aim with a pistol. A school with thirty members of faculty and over a thousand students isn’t going to give you that.”

  “Off-campus, can’t be too far away,” Jamie said. “How often would this training happen?”

  “Training, instructions, shaping behavior,” Gordon said. “I’d guess once a week? Can’t say.”

  “If they are vat-grown,” Helen said. “Then they’d need training on other fronts. How to be human, basic niceties. How to use silverware, how to talk… it might not take too long, but they need to be able to pass.”

  “A house,” I said. “That’s more what we’re looking for than where.”

  “With a kitchen, clothes…” Helen said.

  “Room to move around,” Gordon said. “It’s not a small house with walls shared with anyone else. Neighbors would get suspicious and complain about the noise just as much as anyone else.”

  “And,” Jamie said. “There’s the question of how you make a child act well enough like their former self to pass muster with the child’s own parents.”

  Gordon frowned. “I really don’t want to run away with the wrong idea here. If we go chasing after a wild goose, we might not get another opportunity to get them. How sure are you, Sy?”

  I leaned against the wall. Lillian finished checking me over, and moved over to Gordon. She began unbuttoning his shirt.

  “How sure? Um. It fits. The little detail thing that Jamie was oh-so-recently trying to get me to focus on.”

  “He wasn’t there for that conversation,” Jamie said.

  “Wasn’t he?”

  “No,” Jamie said, very patiently.

  Gordon grunted as Lillian pushed his shoulder back into the socket. She had him go through a range of motions, extending his arm and moving it around.

  “Well, Jamie was talking about the little things that we don’t necessarily pay attention to, that still register in the subconscious. I made a point of calling Mary an experiment, part of my trying to build a rapport with her. She never called me out on it or sounded uncomfortable with the idea. I don’t think she’s ever had illusions about being anything else. She paid a lot of attention when I talked about roles, identity, labels. Part of that is going to this school, but part of it is that she’s acting out a role, and has been for a long time. Whatever’s going on with her, it runs deep.”

  “One student died and was autopsied,” Gordon said. “The rest burned. Wouldn’t a clone turn up on autopsies?”

  “Moment I heard about the remainder being burned, I thought maybe they missed something in the first autopsy, and our puppeteer went out of his way to risk a second close call. But I don’t know for sure whether it would show up.”

  After a pause, we collectively turned to Lillian.

  “It depends on a lot,” she said.

  “That doesn’t tell us anything,” I said.

  “Don’t be a butthole, Sy,” Jamie told me.

  I rolled my eyes.

  “If he tried to accelerate growth, which he must have, then there’s a good chance something would show up. There are chemical ways to promote aging. Hormones, substances, alter the seventh ratio. But those substances turn up, and they have effects. Any drug is like a puzzle piece. We flood the body with puzzle pieces of a particular shape, and intend for those pieces to fit into a specific place and enact a specific function, but you can’t stop it from connecting to other sites, enacting other functions. It’s how we get side effects. We control it with how we deliver the medication and other factors, and some of the best graduates of the Academy have it down to an art, making it so one drug only affects one thing in one way, but that’s a delicate balancing act. That’s without getting into the fact that a badly made clone might be more prone to wear, tear, and side effects.”

  “Is our guy that good?” Jamie asked. “Enough to have the aging drugs down to an art, hiding symptoms from an autopsy?”

  “We don’t know,” Gordon said. “But if what Sy said is true, I’d say he isn’t. He has one area of focus and he’s giving his all in pursuing it.”

  “Okay,” Lillian said. “The second method is more complimentary, then. Altering the fundamental pattern of the clones. Humans mature at an exceptionally slow rate. We saw people try this a decade ago in the Indian Empire. Crown scientists tried to make a slave class that grew to maturity, with a specific level of intelligence. Domesticated humans, strong, playful, good natured, attractive, and obedient. If I’m not mistaken, they tried a lot of things, including imprinted behaviors.”

  Like Mary? I raised my eyebrows. “How did it go?”

  “How do you think it went, Sy?” Gordon asked. “Do you see slaves everywhere?”

  “That’s not saying it didn’t work,” I said.

  “It’s pretty damn indicative,” Gordon said.

  “Guys, guys,” Jamie cut in. “Focus. Please. We need to figure out a direction to go, here.”

  “It involves other problems,” Lillian said. “Like the drugs and hormones, it’s an art unto itself. It requires precision of a different sort, and a broad kind of knowledge. There’s prior work to draw on, other projects that tried similar things, but there would be signs of the attempt that would crop up in an autopsy, unless the work was perfect. Change one thing in the pattern, and it has ripple effects throughout the organism’s development and makeup.”

  “I didn’t realize it was that difficult,” Helen said.

  “Oh my god. It really, really is,” Lillian said, eyes wide, the incredulity she wasn’t voicing clear in her expression.

  “Again, if our puppeteer was that good, why the hell isn’t he already employed by the Academy and earning a small fortune for his talents?” Gordon asked. A rhetorical question.

  Many of us were nodding.

  “Got any more suggestions, Lillian?” Jamie asked. “Because this is good. Very useful. But I don’t think it’s screaming ‘this is our guy’.”

  “For accelerating aging? Those would be the best routes,” Lillian said. “There are others, but I think I’d be wasting our time.”

  “Then we’re stuck,” Gordon said.

  “No. Not exactly. There’s a third possibility,” Lillian said. “Maybe more, but I’m only thinking of three. It kind of complicates things.”

  “Go on,” Gordon said.

  “Don’t,” Lillian said. “Don’t accelerate the aging. If you need them to age, you make them age by letting time pass.”

  “Mary is twelve,” Gordon said. “He’s had this plan in the works for twelve years?”

  “Yes,” Lillian said. “Except not exactly.”

  I opened my mouth, and Jamie shot me a look. I closed my mouth before he called me a butthole again for my poking fun at Lillian.

  “I said it complicates things,” Lillian said. “Because our ‘puppeteer’ could strike a balance. Some natural aging. Some hormones or changes to the pattern. The more he relies on real time passing, the less he needs to accelerate the process. Maybe this project has only been in the works for nine years, or six.”

  “Meaning there could be clues,” Gordon said. “Ones that slipped through in the autopsy.”

  Lillian nodded.

  “More time to develop them,” Helen said. “E
ither he inserts them while they’re young, where a half-socialized clone might go unnoticed amid rabid and rambunctious first graders, or he waits and he observes their real counterpart, and he trains the clones to mime the behaviors in his off-hours.”

  “Yeah. We were wondering why he picked Mary,” I said. “Her parents don’t seem important. But if this project has been in the works for a while…”

  “Maybe we should be looking at who they were,” Gordon finished for me. “Or who they were supposed to become. Our puppeteer was taking stabs in the dark, this could be a stab that missed.”

  “I can look into that end of things, given time,” Jamie said.

  “We might not have a lot of time, but go for it,” I said. “After you direct me to wherever student records are stored.”

  “By the front entrance. Below the front office.”

  “Good,” I said. “Great. I’m going. It’s better if I’m not here. Assuming Mary hasn’t communicated anything to her fellow clones, they’ll assume I’m dead. Play it up, act upset and distressed. Stick together, try to keep them distracted and occupied. Best case scenario, they’ll still think I’m dead and I can catch them off guard when I’m back.”

  “If you do, don’t try to fight them,” Gordon said, his expression blank.

  “They’re trained, I know,” I said.

  “That, too,” Gordon said.

  I frowned, but I was already heading toward the stairs, so I turned on the spot, switching to walking backward, if only to make my expression as clear as possible.

  “Lillian,” I spoke up.

  She looked at me, a crease between her eyebrows. Annoyance, worry?

  “That Academy know-how you just dropped on us? That was good. Smart stuff.”

  If anything, the crease between her eyebrows deepened. Her mouth moved, the start of a frown.

  I didn’t see the rest of it. I headed up the stairs, taking them two at a time, very nearly silent. I ducked low and peered into the darkness to check the way was clear. Only when I was on the move again did I spare Lillian’s expression another thought. I’d given her a compliment, and she’d reacted like I’d slapped her in the face.

  Dissonance, I realized.