The Big Sheep

by Robert Kroese

  “Yes,” said Allebach. “She had the same inherent flaw as the rest of them. Every ten weeks we erase her most recent memories and start over. We used to tell her she was taking a break from filming to relieve stress. That’s why we bought this resort initially. But we’ve found it makes little difference what we tell her. Ten weeks later she’s a basket case, and we have to wipe her memory again. We’ve tried to pinpoint the source of the psychosis, modify her memories to prevent the meltdown, but nothing works. Bryn was on the verge of a psychotic break when Selah found her, and she’s going to have that break no matter what we do. It’s hardwired into her brain.”

  “Every ten weeks for two years,” said Keane. “That’s over ten resets. That can’t be good for a person.”

  “It isn’t,” said Allebach. “Between the resets and the memory transfer process we have to go through every time we activate another clone, her brain is experiencing a lot of trauma. She’s begun to have seizures, and we almost lost her last week to an aneurism. The trauma also made her mental state worse, exacerbating her psychosis. Even at the beginning of a reset, we had to keep her on high doses of antianxiety and antipsychotic drugs, and she’s begun to experience symptoms of dementia. She was aging nearly as fast as the clones.”

  “Was?” I asked.

  “It’s not a problem anymore,” said Selah.

  “Why is that?” I asked.

  “Because,” said Keane. “They found a body that can tolerate the resets and memory transfers. A body that regenerates faster than they destroy it.”

  “Yes,” said Allebach. “We transferred Bryn’s memories to a host better suited to handle the stress. The procedure was a success, although it seems that Bryn’s original body is unlikely to survive it. Her mind is already gone, as you can see.”

  “You killed her,” I said.

  “You’re not listening, Mr. Keane,” said Selah. “Bryn’s body was used up. We found her a new one. One that will never wear out. It’s not, I suppose, an ideal host, but you work with what you have.”

  I’d been so focused on the horror of what they had done to the woman on the bed that it hadn’t fully registered what she and Keane were saying. “Hang on,” I said as I processed the conversation. “You can’t possibly be saying…”

  Selah smiled. “Would you like to see her?”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Selah and Allebach led us down the hall to another room, with Brian following to make sure we behaved. Selah dismissed the other two men, presumably to free them up to pursue other gun-toting-thug-related duties. We entered a room similar to the one we had just been in, but there was no bed. Straw was scattered on the floor, and in the corner was a trough full of water. In the middle of the room, watching us, was Mary the sheep.

  Except it wasn’t Mary. It was Priya Mistry. Or Bryn Jhaveri, I suppose. Even if I hadn’t known about the memory transfer, I think I’d have noticed something strange about this sheep. An intelligent glint in the eye. Maybe I was imagining it.

  “Hello,” said the sheep, eyeing us uncertainly.

  The sheep’s mouth didn’t move, and for a moment I thought I was hallucinating again. Then I realized that the voice was coming from a small speaker hanging from a collar around its neck. The speaker was connected to a harness on the sheep’s head.

  “It’s a thought-to-voice translator,” said Selah. “A sheep’s mouth isn’t suited for articulating human speech, so we use this device to allow her to communicate with us. How are you today, Bryn?”

  “I’m okay,” said the sheep. “I feel a little … funny.” The voice was generic and vaguely female-sounding, and I was having a hard time accepting the fact that this was really her.

  “You conducted the memory transfer process on the sheep,” said Keane, staring with fascination at the sheep. “Transferred Bryn’s memories and personality to Mary’s body.”

  “We used a somewhat more thorough process than we’d used on the clones,” said Allebach. “The sheep had already built up five years’ worth of memories, and we needed to make sure we wiped out any trace of them. We also needed to make sure we had a high-fidelity copy of Bryn’s memories, because the sheep will be the source of Bryn’s personality for all future clones.”

  “That’s why Bryn is dying,” I said. “You sucked her brain out.”

  The sheep shuddered slightly and looked at me with alarm. At least, I think it was alarm. I don’t have a lot of practice reading the facial expressions of sheep.

  “Try not to upset her,” Selah scolded. “Bryn isn’t dying. Not ever.”

  That gave me a bit of a chill as I remembered what Takemago told us about Esper’s sheep: they might very well be immortal. Even if nobody ever unlocked the secret of human immortality, in a hundred years Flagship could still be producing original shows starring Priya Mistry, cloned from Bryn Jhaveri’s DNA and using memories copied from the sheep.

  “But … why?” I asked.

  “As I said,” Selah replied. “Bryn’s psyche has a fundamental flaw. That flaw causes excessive stress on any body that hosts her memories. Priya Mistry is too valuable a property to be allowed to burn out. I need her around for at least another ten years, and her body wasn’t going to last another six weeks. Fortunately, due to my previous association with Esper Corporation, I knew of a suitable host body that could tolerate the stress—indefinitely. And I figured they owed me.”

  “I don’t understand what’s happening,” said the sheep.

  “Nothing to worry about, Bryn,” said Selah. “This is Mr. Keane and Mr. Fowler. They just stopped by to make sure you’re being treated well.”

  The sheep nodded slowly, which I found unexpectedly creepy. I’d never seen a sheep nod before. “I was just thinking about drinking some water and then going to sleep,” said the sheep. “I’m very tired today, for some reason.”

  “You seem oddly unperturbed by the fact that you’re a sheep, Bryn,” said Keane.

  The sheep stared at him for a moment and then looked down at her body. “I am, aren’t I?” she said.

  “Do you find that fact upsetting?” asked Keane.

  “I think I did at first,” said the sheep. “But I guess I’ve gotten used to it. I don’t really think about it anymore.”

  “How could you possibly have gotten used to it?” I asked, astounded. “You’ve only been a sheep for—”

  “Six months,” Selah interrupted.

  “That’s impossible,” I said. “Two days ago, the sheep was in a garage in—”

  “Two days ago,” Selah said, “Bryn was right here. She spent the day eating grass in the sunshine, and then was brought back here at night to go to sleep, just as she does every day. She finds it very comforting. Don’t you, Bryn?”

  “Yes,” said the sheep. “I do. I love grass. And sunshine. What were you going to say about a sheep being in a garage, Mr. Fowler?”

  “Mr. Fowler is confused,” said Selah. “He’s thinking of a different sheep.” She shot me a glare that told me I’d better not contradict her. “We’ll leave you be, Bryn. Sleep well.”

  Selah turned and left the room, Allebach following close behind. Brian, his rifle still trained on Keane and me, nodded at the door, indicating we were to leave as well. Keane started toward the door. I paused, taking a last look at the Bryn-sheep. “Good-bye, Bryn,” I said. “It was nice to finally meet you.”

  “Nice to meet you too,” said the Bryn-sheep. She held my gaze for a moment, and then walked to her trough and began lapping up water.

  We followed Selah down the hall, prodded by Brian.

  “How could you do that to her?” I asked.

  Selah shrugged. “I’ve done the best I could for everyone involved. Bryn agreed to this arrangement, knowing the risks.”

  “You’re telling me she agreed to be turned into a sheep?”

  “She agreed to have her memories transferred to any host we chose. The fact that in this case the host is a farm animal is immaterial. Of course, legally speaking, the cre
ature you just spoke to is not human, and therefore has no rights. So we no longer have any legal obligation to consider Bryn’s opinions on the matter. Once Bryn’s body dies, our business relationship will be at an end.”

  I shook my head, hardly believing what I was hearing.

  Selah led us down the hall to another door. She waved her palm in front of a scanner, and we went inside, Brian bringing up the rear. We found ourselves in a vast laboratory that resembled the one we’d met Dr. Takemago in at the Esper building. The walls were lined with banks of ominous-looking equipment and displays, and articulated robotic arms dangled in several places from the ceiling. Several lab-coated technicians milled about the room, engaged in various mysterious tasks.

  In the middle of the room were two empty hospital beds. Toward the far wall were twelve vaguely sarcophaguslike chambers. Through a window near the top of seven of the chambers—the ones on the right-hand side of the series—a young woman’s face was visible. It was the same woman, Bryn Jhaveri, at three different stages in her development. The three on the far right were identical to the Priya Mistry we knew. The fourth looked almost like Priya, but something was a little off about her. After a moment it registered with me that the clone hadn’t yet been subjected to the cosmetic surgery that would perfect her appearance. So that was another bit of truth in what Selah had told us: whatever genetic modifications they’d made to Bryn, they apparently still relied largely on surgery to make her look like Priya Mistry. The one to the left of the “unfinished” Priya looked like a teenager, and the third one was so young that only the top of her head showed through the window. It occurred to me that the other four chambers might not actually be empty; they probably held smaller, younger versions of Priya. Younger was a relative term, of course. The real age difference was probably just weeks, or even days.

  “So this is where stars are born,” mused Keane.

  “Just one star, so far,” said Selah. “Every one of her.”

  “And one lab technician,” said Keane.

  Selah nodded. “Hugo Díaz. Mag-Lev’s people needed a corpse to avoid suspicion.”

  “This is insane,” I said. “You know that, right? Why are you doing this?”

  “We’ve been over this,” said Selah. “Priya is too valuable a property not to take full advantage of her.”

  “I get the economics of it,” I said. “What I’m wondering is, what kind of twisted individual builds a secret lab under a Malibu resort to make copies of a human being, with the sole purpose of increasing their bottom line? How does that even occur to you?”

  Selah shrugged. “It all just sort of came together. We had originally planned to use only cosmetic surgery to make Bryn into Priya, but there are limits to what surgery can accomplish. I was familiar with Esper’s work on gene therapy because of my previous association with them, so I hired Esper’s expert to consult on the possibility of using gene therapy to perfect Priya.”

  “Michael Guryev,” said Keane. “God rest his soul.”

  Selah went on. “Dr. Guryev was very interested in the possibility of making practical use of his work, but he was insistent we keep his involvement secret, because of various legal and ethical concerns. So I created the Tannhauser Institute. When Bryn began developing serious psychological problems, I hired several psychologists to treat her, but the only treatment that had any effect was repressing her recent memories through posthypnotic suggestion. Their hypothesis was that the paranoia was a result of Bryn’s experience in the lab, so we assumed that if we repressed those memories, we’d cure her. When the paranoia kept resurfacing, one of my psychologists suggested contacting Dr. Allebach. Dr. Allebach devised a process for thoroughly erasing Bryn’s memories, but the problem paranoia continued to resurface. Even creating a buffer of artificial memories didn’t help significantly. Every ten weeks, we had to wipe her memories again. It was clear that Bryn’s body wasn’t going to be able to survive this indefinitely. Allebach and Guryev came up with the idea of artificially aged clones, with Bryn’s memory implanted in them. But this was a temporary solution as well, as I’ve explained.”

  “Why not just transfer her memories from one clone to another?” asked Keane. “You could keep doing that indefinitely.”

  “Copies of copies,” said Allebach. “The brain is an analog system. Fidelity is lost with each transfer. After five or six generations, the quality would have degraded to a noticeable level. We needed a more permanent solution.”

  “Dr. Guryev knew about the special qualities of Esper’s sheep,” said Selah. “He suggested that Mary would be a suitable vessel for Bryn’s memories. The idea gave me pause, but we couldn’t think of any reason it wouldn’t work.”

  “Clearly, the fact that it’s batshit crazy didn’t factor in,” I said. “And I don’t buy your story. You found a young actress with a lot of potential, and somehow on the way to making her a star, you kind of accidentally created a top-secret illegal cloning program? It’s bullshit. Something else is going on here.”

  “Immortality,” said Keane. “That was Selah’s original reason for getting involved with Esper. And that’s still what she’s after. Priya Mistry was just a test run, albeit a very lucrative one. Her ultimate goal is a new body for herself. As soon as they solve the problems associated with accelerated aging, she’ll clone her own body, transfer her memories to it, and have her current body ‘retired.’”

  Selah smiled, as if pleased Keane had figured her out.

  “Of course,” Keane added, “the new version of her will have a critical flaw, much like the Priya clones.”

  “Oh?” said Selah, bemused. “What’s that, Mr. Keane?”

  “You’ll still be a lunatic,” Keane replied. “You realize that your own plan demonstrates you’re a sociopath, right? You’re assuming that your identity is going to be transferred to your new body along with your memories, but if that’s true, then all the copies you’ve made of Bryn are just as much Bryn as the original, including the sheep. By your own logic, they’re all human beings, but you treat them as cattle.”

  Selah shrugged. “Such abstract philosophical considerations don’t interest me,” she said. “What matters is that my ideas, my plans, and my memories will live on.”

  “Narcissistic sociopath,” said Keane. “All right, you obviously brought us here for a reason. Are you going to give us the grand tour? What’s the deal with the Matryoshka dolls?” He was indicating the Priyas lined up in the sarcophagi.

  “The three on the right have already been imprinted with Bryn’s memory,” explained Allebach. “They’re ready to be activated at any time. We simply wake them up, subject them to the artificial memory implantation process that fills in the gaps from the past few months with a history appropriate to that particular iteration of Priya, and then transport her to a hotel. She wakes up the next day and goes to work.”

  “I suppose you’re going to tell us this is legal as well?” I said.

  “Actually,” said Selah, “I can make a compelling case that it is. There are a number of anti-cloning laws on the books, but the current prevailing legal theory is that each individual owns his or her own DNA. DNA is simply information, and if you own the information, you have the right to duplicate it—or to sell it to someone else. The principle is no different than an author giving a publisher a right to make copies of a book he’s written. Bryn Jhaveri gave us a license to reproduce her DNA in perpetuity, and since DNA never lapses into the public domain like other intellectual property, that means Flagship can keep making copies of her forever.”

  “I question your legal interpretation,” said Keane. “But whether or not what you’re doing is illegal, it’s distasteful. If word got out, Flagship would take a PR beating.”

  Selah laughed. “Your cards are showing, Mr. Keane,” she said. “Is that your plan? Let me guess: if anything happens to you and Mr. Fowler, a message goes out to a hundred media outlets telling them all about the great Priya Mistry conspiracy?”

  “Some
thing like that,” said Keane.

  “Oh, Mr. Keane,” said Selah. “You are brilliant, but I’m afraid you’ve miscalculated. I own most of the media outlets in this town. Not all of them, but enough to determine the narrative. All the other news outlets will follow my lead. So if I say the story is how a famed detective’s obsession with Priya Misty drove him mad, causing him to devise a bizarre story about a secret underground cloning laboratory, that will be the story. By the time anyone thinks to check any of the details of your crazy allegations, I’ll have moved this entire operation somewhere else. We’ll have to cut down on Priya’s appearances for a few months, but I was planning on doing that anyway. I track public perception of Priya Mistry very closely, and my research tells me we’re reaching a point of diminishing returns. Priya needs to make fewer public appearances for a while, or we risk overexposure.”

  “That would be a shame,” I said. “God forbid your brand be damaged.”

  Selah shrugged. “Cherish your moral outrage as long as you can, Mr. Fowler. An hour from now you and Mr. Keane are going to wake up in your beds at home, with no memory of this place. Dr. Allebach is going to erase everything that happened over the past three days. You’ll never have met me or Priya Mistry, and you won’t know anything about a missing sheep. They’ll also remove any hard evidence they find in your building. And before Dr. Allebach wipes your memories, he’s going to extract all your passwords so that my operatives can also delete any notes you’ve made about this case. He’ll insert memories of a thoroughly unremarkable week, so you won’t suspect anything. Maybe someday you’ll realize something doesn’t fit, but you’ll never put the whole puzzle together. And even if you do, there will be nothing you can do about it. This whole operation will be gone, and I’ll never let either of you get close to Priya again. Sorry, gentlemen. This is where the story ends for you.” She nodded at Dr. Allebach.

  “This way,” said Allebach, indicating the two hospital beds. I hesitated for a moment, and then Brian pointed his rifle at my head.