Counterpart (18 page)

As everyone disembarks, Samuel pulls me aside. I can't help drawing comparisons to the moment when Zelda dragged me out of the queue for the elevator, inadvertently saving both our lives. Everything seems to remind me of that horrible day. It's like carrying around a large cup of water I can't put down.

“Can we talk?” he asks me.

Most people's fear of that phrase borders on primeval, as if at some point in humanity's past one caveman turned to his companion and said “Can we talk?” right before clubbing them over the head and kicking them into a fire. I'm no exception.

“That's funny. Because I was just about to ask you the same thing,” I say, smiling weakly to cover my own nerves. “Has anyone on the council contacted you yet?”

He freezes like a doe in headlights. Like I've just caught him out. “I figured they were going to want answers, so I may—or may not—have dodged Lefevre and a few others in the hangar on my way here. I wanted to tell you first. You should…you should hear it all from me first.”

“Hear what? Wait. Not here.”

Instead of heading toward my quarters, I lead Samuel toward the Entertainment section. He follows obediently, silently, a shadow of the man I know, shrouded in a guilt I don't yet understand.

The Entertainment section, located on the northern side of dormitory level, has always struck me as something of an anomaly in a base otherwise devoted solely to survival. Entering the area is like stepping back in time to an era where frivolity was not only acceptable, but encouraged.

The main room, which could fit the mess hall twice over, and comfortably, was formerly a cold, unwelcoming space until we remodeled it after a twentieth-century casino, replete with warm recessed lighting, splashes of diamond art on the walls, and a carpet patterned in a long-deceased art-deco style. (When I first arrived at McKinley, Samuel regaled me with the story of how we acquired the carpet from an establishment in Anchorage during an expedition for supplies years before. It was Hanna's idea, along with most of the décor. She's always had a thing for the past.) In the absence of slot machines, the room is dominated by dozens of dark maple tables, chairs, and mismatched sofas and loveseats, providing plenty of seating for conversation, public events, work, or study. I even saw a Magic: The Gathering card tournament being hosted here one night, and rumor has it a group of role-players meets every Wednesday to play an old tabletop game.

“Where are we going?” Samuel asks me.

“Somewhere we won't be interrupted,” I reply. “Or overheard.”

Together, we travel through the main room to the arcade section in the back. The black lights turn the whites in our shirts purple. We look like a pair of luminescent creatures plunging through the ocean depths. As we walk, boxy game consoles and pinball machines jut suddenly out of the dark, startling me with a burst of light or sound. It's noisy in here, each system vying for our attention with a plethora of eight-bit tunes and cheesy FX soundtracks. Normally, I find it charming. Right now, however, I'm running on so little sleep that I'm surprised I'm not seeing fairies floating around.

As we make our way toward the back, Samuel gravitates toward one console that has
Space Invaders
written in large yellow letters on the side, faded by time. Though they don't require money anymore to run, I notice they still possess their original coin slots and ticket dispensers on the front. How cute.

“Check this out,” he says in a voice loud enough to be heard over the thrumming bass line of whatever song's blaring from the loudspeakers. I watch him run his hands over the controls, utterly familiar. For a moment, his eyes brighten, and his lips curve into a smile. These games, as old as they may be, hold important sentimental value for him. “We came here after that partial collapse on Command last year. Do you remember?”

I do. I remember one conversation in particular:

“So how do you win?” I asked him.

Apparently knowledge of classic arcade games hadn't survived the leap from my predecessor's brain to mine.

“Win?” Samuel had replied.

“Yeah, you know, the opposite of losing. That thing.”

“Oh, well, you don't. Win, I mean. There's no set end. You just play until you lose.”

Yeah. Story of my life.

I drag my hand through my hair. “Samuel. I'd love to take a trip with you down memory lane, but I'm exhausted.”

“Right,” he says, stepping away from the machine. His disappointment is palpable.

I take him by the hand, pulling him into a nearby booth, but even here the music continues to throb in my ears like a heartbeat. “Okay. Out with it.” Between the vigil, the debate over Commander Pan's life, and the crazy machine on the biology level, whatever calm I had at the beginning of the night is completely gone. I'm nothing but a bundle of nerves now. I feel like a power line some animal's been chewing on, still giving off the occasional spark.

“We went to Brooks, Rhon.” Samuel pushes the confession out quickly, like ripping off a bandage.

“What? Why?”

“While we were refueling in Bettles, I had the thought that something might be left over to salvage. Maybe some equipment or medical supplies survived the inferno. It was worth a look, since we were so close, anyway. And I wanted to see…I don't know. I knew it was all gone. I just needed to see the facility with my own eyes again, one last time.”

“Okay.” Suspicion crawls down my spine like a stranger's fingertips. It's a fight not to rush him with my theories, but I also don't want him to turn defensive or clam up. “Find anything interesting?”

He mumbles something, forcing me to scoot closer and ask him to repeat himself.

“The facility,” he says again, “it survived. Well, parts of it, anyway.”

Fear grabs me by the throat, making it difficult to get the next words out. “But we saw it explode. Brooks went up in flames.”

“I know. Believe me, I remember.” He drags a hand through his rumpled brown hair. I wonder how long it's been since he slept. Darkness hangs beneath his eyes like a shadow of his troubled thoughts. “But Brooks is a big facility. Maybe the machines managed to disarm some of the explosives when they invaded, or maybe they were duds to begin with. Either way, when we went back to investigate, we discovered the eastern wing fared particularly well, including the cloning room. There was some water damage from the sprinkler systems, and without heating, all of the old computers were frozen beyond recovery. But the caskets…”

“Caskets?”

“Capsules, I mean.” He corrects himself quickly, his cheeks flushing pink. “Sorry. Ulrich used to call them caskets because they look a little like—”

“Coffins. Yeah, I remember.”

“The capsules were…gone.”

“You mean empty.” I don't know why I say it. If they were empty, Samuel would have said they were empty. But he said gone. As in no longer there. What he should have said, and what's implied by his guilty, stricken look, is
taken.
The capsules, and their contents, were taken—and we both know by who.

Samuel squirms under my gaze. “Rhona, I'm sorry. I didn't think…I never imagined—”

I give a small jazz-hand performance, heading off his excuses. “Hold on. Stop. Back up. Are you saying the machines took the capsules?” My horror is tempered by selfish relief. I was right, and wrong. It's not Rhona, my celebrated progenitor, back from the dead to reclaim her life and Camus, but a brainwashed clone. The person responsible for smuggling in the machines, for committing atrocities against McKinley's innocent population—it's just another clone.

“We searched the whole base,” Samuel says. “There was no sign of the capsules, or the—what was inside them.” He cleverly avoids the word “clone” as if doing so will avoid reminding me of what I am. Less than. Secondary.

“How did this happen?”

“That's just it!” Samuel gestures with his hands so wildly it draws the attention of the men playing pool nearby. He drops his arms and we both inch a little farther into the curve of the booth. I don't mind our sudden proximity, but I worry what effect it might have on Samuel. We haven't spoken much since I made my decision to stay with Camus, and Samuel departed with his scavenging team. I don't want to make this reunion any harder on him than it already is.

“It shouldn't have,” Samuel continues, not giving any indication that he even notices our arms pressed against one another. “The contingency plan
should
have worked. But it didn't.” He casts his eyes down at the table, and when he speaks, there's a sharp ache in his voice. “This is all my fault, Rhona. I should have implemented more safety protocols. Ulrich wanted to place more bombs. I should have listened to him—”

“The time to beat yourself up about this is later. Right now, we have a clone on the loose somewhere inside McKinley. I need to know what I'm up against here. I counted six capsules, including mine, when we escaped Brooks.”

He nods. “Right. There were six clones, including you, but only one of them was as far along in their development. The rest were suffering from defects, both physical and mental, that I was trying to correct. Psoriasis and trichotillomania, for instance. As I began experimenting with mapping neurons, I found comorbidity became a major issue.”

“Why is that?”

He rubs at his wrists. “Do you really want the specifics?”

That's when I realize how much Samuel has been keeping from me. All the grisly details of cloning—the hideous failures that must have preceded success. Samuel is a terrible liar, but he's not half-bad at hoarding secrets, especially when he's trying to protect my feelings.

Or himself.

I haven't forgotten how the council interrogated Samuel upon our return to McKinley. In a less than stunning twist of events, human experimentation is still frowned upon, even when no laws and no law-enforcement agencies exist to fight it anymore.

“Yes,” I answer. “Tell me.”

So he does.

Samuel begins by explaining the challenges he faced in trying to clone me, working with decades of older research, most of it outdated and unhelpful. Page after page about cloning goats and cows and corn and wheat—meat and vegetation to help solve growing hunger crises around the world. The climate was changing before the Machinations, whole regions suffering from record-breaking droughts and extremely cold winters. It destabilized the Middle East. Which destabilized Europe, which destabilized the relationship between the United States and the New Soviet Union, which increased tensions between the United States and Asia, specifically China, and so on.

“I know all this,” I interrupt. The council briefed me months ago, filling in the gaps in my knowledge, not only for practicality's sake, but in case I was ever drilled by our allies about the geopolitical circumstances leading to our current predicament. The “real” Rhona would have had all this memorized. She lived it, after all. “This created an arms race which led to the creation of the higher echelon and the machines.”

“Yes and no. Calling what preceded the Machinations an arms race is like calling a triathlon a brisk walk. The technology sector exploded. It wasn't just about AI and weaponry. High-speed communications, medicine, cloning…Everyone seemed to have some crazy idea for an invention that would solve all our problems. Some of them were good ideas, too. Great. Others, less so. I waded through a lot of scientific journals, trying to parse the good from the bad while conducting my own research. Reliable science is built on trial and error, after all.”

“Great, but what about the clones?”

“Right. Right.” He flattens his hands against the table. “Well. A lot of them died, at first.”

“How many?”

“Twenty-three,” he repeats softly. “Before that final—batch, I guess you'd call it, twenty-three died. I struggled to get the accelerated growth rate right in the beginning. Anything faster than nine months caused a lot of problems. Heart attacks, seizures…It frequently compromised their immune system, too. If they weren't dying from minor infections, then it was allergic reactions to I don't know what. Materials in the capsule itself, maybe. The latex in my gloves. Who knows?

“And every now and then, the—I always called it ‘the mold,' but that's not exactly a scientific term—didn't work right, either. DNA is notoriously prone to mutation, especially when all I had to work with were aging cell cultures.”

“So, what? Some of my clones grew two heads?”

He gives a dry chuckle. “I'm not
that
bad at biology. Mostly the mutations killed them in their infancy, but every now and then one survived long enough to show their phenotype—their physical traits. A departure from your appearance rendered the whole project moot, obviously. And I only had six capsules, so I could only work on six…um, projects at a time.”

My mouth goes suddenly dry, the implication coming at me clear as a knife flashing in daylight. “You killed them.”

“They were never conscious,” he insists. “They had no thoughts, no dreams, no fear. And they wouldn't have felt any pain, at any point. It was all done as humanely as possible.”

As humanely as possible.
At these words, I lean away instinctively, putting distance between our shoulders. I know the comparison is unfair, unearned, that it's just
science
, but it feels like my friend just admitted to murder. “And you did this twenty-three times?”

“No. It happened much more rarely, and not as much toward the end, as I perfected the gene translation. Although, in the last round—the one including you—another clone developed albinism. White skin, red eyes instead of red hair. I called her Rhona the White.” His smile is sad, and it causes a painful twinge in my heart. He's never told me this before, any of it. I can see why. “You were showing every sign of surviving, and she was technically healthy, so I left her alone. Just in case.”