Rift (32 page)

Wait a minute.

“When did Crystal go through the machine?” I ask him.

“Really, Cameron, why don't you—”

“Because if the machine is a cloning device, and if the scan doesn't disturb the original, why did you need me to test it? Why pay me five million dollars when you could have tested it on yourself? Sure, the clone may have come through fucked up, but why would you care about that? You could just destroy it and try again.”

Seconds march by as I wait for his answer. I count the beats of time with my pounding heart. The Crystal clone stands at the plate window, trying to appear uninterested in our conversation.

“Congratulations, Cameron,” Batista finally says. “It's great that you've finally figured this out. And that you've been maneuvered by Stanley to trap me in this boardroom with your detonator and martyrdom. But in the end, I have to wonder if you aren't still the underachieving loser who sucked my company dry for six years. Isn't this stand, this final hour you've created, isn't it really nothing more than a cry for help? ‘I've got a bomb! I'll blow you to hell if you don't tell me why you did this to me!' Poor Cameron. Do you know why I picked you as my test subject? Because you always seemed like a leech to me, a leech stuck to the balls of NeuroStor, a company that thrives on the efforts of Go-Getters and Forward-Thinkers and teammates who can Walk the Talk. I chose you as our guinea pig because it was the only thing you had to offer me, because you were worth much more to me that way even if you died in the process.”

“How am I a test subject? Aren't all the volunteers test subjects?”

“Cameron,
you
were the only ‘volunteer.' ”

“But you said—”

“Come on, you just figured it out. The scanning procedure doesn't disrupt the original, right? At least not until you run the scan wave at nine times normal speed. Did you know that our fastest supercomputer takes over fourteen hours to scan an original and reassemble him using the standard originally developed? That's much too long for interested buyers who might need to generate new clones on an emergency basis. So we developed a new scan procedure, a faster one, but one we feared might disrupt the original. And we couldn't very well risk valuable members of the team to test something that—”

Red. With Batista's admission I see only red. For not only did he lie to me about the nature of the machine, but apparently he transmitted me knowing that something would likely go wrong.

“—and what's funny, Cameron, is that it appears the new scanning procedure doesn't hurt the original after all. Just the copy. And that's because, on top of the increased scan speed, we also compressed the extracted data. Very complex algorithms were designed to perform this procedure, of course, but it appears our calculations need work. Because obviously you've developed significant compression artifacts.”

My heart throttles. My eyes see red. I want to say something to him, make him understand the depth of my rage, the power of my vengeance—for singling me out, for picking me alone to suffer at the hands of his monstrous experiment—but just then my left leg begins to shudder. My free hand reaches for my thigh, trying to steady it, but of course this doesn't help. And I feel something wet in there.

“Come on, Cameron. You don't have the courage to commit suicide. Besides, what do you hope to gain by blowing up the building? Is killing me your only goal? I sure hope that isn't the case, because you have to know I've gone through the machine before. I can be reproduced as easily as Crystal was. And if you're looking for more than that, if you think you'll somehow put a stop to my plan, if you think I won't still be able to sell the machine, think again. This office is maintained purely for public appearance. Our nerve center is in Wyoming, far away from here and safe from renegade morality plays such as yours. So what do you say, Cameron? Why don't you give this up while you still have the chance?”

Am I bleeding? Has it begun already?

“Cameron?” someone says.

My hands begin to shake. Sweat spills out of my pores as if I've sprung a thousand leaks. My finger, pressed so firmly against the detonator button, nearly slips. Stops the heart. Starts it again. Can I go through with this?

“I have your wife, Cameron.”

Batista again. Red and red. What the hell is he saying now?

“If you blow up this building, if you kill us, I have given instructions to have her terminated.”

“Liar,” I manage. “I know she's safe. The other Cameron told me so.”

“He's going to do it!” a female voice says. A blur as the Crystal clone dashes toward the doors. But they are locked again.

Oh, God.

“Don't be stupid, Cameron. They've been lying to you. Crystal used you to get to us, and her brother sold out to King. This has nothing, really, to do with you. Don't—”

But his shaking hands betray him. His voice, normally rugged and intelligent and confident, has begun to crack. He knows this has everything to do with me. He lied to me and created me and cursed me with terminal compression artifacts. I can't know if he's being truthful about the complex in Wyoming or if he has really been through the machine, but I do not care. The video I have shot, that he apparently knows nothing about, will take care of everything after today. But right now, in this moment, Batista is about to pay, finally, for his transgressions against me, against humanity, against . . . against . . .

Nausea begins to creep into my belly, up my throat, lodging the Ping-Pong ball there once more. Continued sweat in my eyes. Blurred vision.

“She will die, Cameron. Misty will die, do you hear me, do you . . .”

His voice, still going, fades away from me. Rushing air or water or rushing
something
fills my ears. I can't do this. I can't kill myself. My God, Misty, Crystal, what have I done? My hand is on the button, and maybe I could dismantle this, maybe I could rip this detonator from the C4 so the electrical current never enters the explosive, but—

—but this . . . this is death. No hope for survival. And though I knew mine was a one-way ticket, knew that my sprint into this building and climb up the stairs would be the last race I would ever run, I can't seem to let go of the button. And Batista continues to preach to me, his voice rising with each sentence, imploring me to give myself up, to lie down in defeat.

There is enough C4 in my suit to blow the top off this building and kill me instantly, but he doesn't believe I can do it. Batista doesn't believe in me.

Do I believe in me?

Can I go through with this?

God, I loved Misty with all my heart. I still love her, but she is not mine, and I could have loved another, I could have loved Crystal, I don't want to lose her, not when she just came into my life, and I . . .

and

Oh, God, Luke, I could have had a reason to live if you just hadn't died, if you hadn't died as a baby, just a tiny, innocent baby who we loved so much, Luke

Luke
! I—

—have this recurring dream. It involves my own death. My funeral, really. The service is held at Hemingford Unity Cemetery, where every so often a body is hidden in the red clay north of Wichita Falls, Texas—

—and I raise the detonator out again, up again, in front of me, in front of Batista, in front of the Crystal clone, in front of the minuscule turnout at my funeral, so they can see what I am about to do, so he can see, Batista, so
he
can see, it's in his eyes, fear, because he is
scared,
he is
afraid,
because he brought this upon himself, arrogance overshadowing reason, his drive to succeed running roughshod over moral principles, and in this moment—

fuck you Rodrigo Batista

—in this moment I know he is just as frightened and unsure about death and afterlife as I am, and I feel pity for the Crystal clone because she did nothing to bring this on herself, she is a copy of the woman I could have loved—

—and much closer now I hear sirens I hear I hear I feel—

—I feel pity for the beautiful clone as I do for myself because death is a mystery to us, because none of us really knows God, and maybe I
do
believe, maybe I
need
Him now, but where is He, where is He, anywhere but here, oh God why am I here, what has become of me, what am I, who am I, no longer Cameron, the division complete, two separate entities, a rift, Misty gone, our relationship disintegrated, the pieces no longer fit, they didn't fit and this is who I am, a corrupted human, the cracks are showing they don't fit together they don't fit the pieces don't fit I love you Misty I love you Crystal I don't want to die but the pieces don't fit and I can't help it I see red I see red I . . . no, I can't do it I cannot self-terminate . . . I see redredred . . . I redredredredred I . . . don't forget my eulogy . . . I see redredred I release the—

epilogue

I
gasp and Crystal screams as Cameron thrusts the detonator before him. We see everything as he sees it—the camera is mounted just to the right of his forehead after all—and then Crystal grabs me, and I grab the laptop, and together we turn away from the NeuroStor building. One hundred and fifty yards and a row of trees separate us from Cameron and his C4, and still the explosion rocks the ground beneath us and throws the Buick forward. Chunks of concrete and rebar missiles rain down around us. The car is hit once, twice, and the second one nearly punches a hole in the roof.

Then the world around us, already wise to the tension inside the NeuroStor building, roars and screams as engines and sirens converge on this business park in Plano, Texas.

I look down at the laptop and am relieved to find it still running. The transfer is complete. Now all I have to do is end the recording, perform the MPEG conversions, and then begin the e-mails.

“Let's get out of here,” Crystal says, her voice wavering.

Slowly, she maneuvers the car through the parking lot. She's crying fiercely, and there is nothing I can say to comfort her, so I don't say anything.

It seems likely that a patrol car might pull us over to ask questions, but the pandemonium has drawn all attention to NeuroStor. Soon we are out of the business park, and in another few minutes we have made it to the freeway.

“Where to?” she asks, now somewhat composed.

“Wait a minute,” I say to her. “What the hell just happened in there? What was that business about Clay? And what the hell did Batista mean when he said the scan wave was run at nine times speed?”

“We need to get somewhere safe,” Crystal says. “You'll have time to ask all the questions you want later.”

“No way. Cameron just went in there and sacrificed himself. I think I deserve answers now, and I want you to give them to me.”

Crystal just looks at me.

“Well? Am I in danger now, too?”

“I don't know.”

“What do you mean, you don't know?”

“I mean that Rodrigo's scientists weren't sure what effect the altered scanning process would have on the original. So he devised a ‘volunteer' program that was nothing more than forcing you to go through the machine.”

“One test subject? Me?”

She doesn't answer.

“That's not exactly a statistically valid sample, one person.”

“He planned others later. You weren't going to be the only one. But the Israelis and Pakistanis were really after him. He needed something to show them, so he picked you first.”

“I don't understand how he thought he was going to pull this off. I mean, what was he going to do with me? Before Cameron ran?”

“To be honest, I don't think he expected Cameron to come through alive,” Crystal says. “I'm sure the whole time he just planned to tell you that it didn't work. But when Cameron came through okay, Rodrigo probably decided to watch him for the two days and then kill him.”

“
Kill
him?”

“Kill him and then do everything else the same. Feed you the story about how you were okay at first and then showed up at the Phoenix portal with amnesia.”

“But if Batista was just going to kill Cameron anyway, why even let him leave at all? Why not keep him in lockdown and run tests on him?”

“Well, if they're going to keep him for two days, they'd have to make it look to Misty and Tom that everything was okay.”

“But they still could have kept him locked up and just told me that it didn't work. Since they didn't expect it to work anyway.”

“I suppose. But that doesn't sound like Rodrigo, does it? When his experiment actually worked, he probably couldn't resist seeing his precious clone interact with the real world.”

I consider this and realize that maybe it's not the easiest thing to guess why a madman like Batista would do anything.

But I still have more questions. “What about that woman? What the hell was she doing there? Obviously you've been through the machine.”

Crystal nods.

“She was your clone.”

“Obviously she was a clone.”

“And you're the original?”

“We're coming up on 635. We need to make a decision on where to go, Cameron. Let's figure that out, and then I'll answer more questions.”

“Fine. You have any suggestions?”

“We should obviously turn ourselves in,” she says. “But not to the police. The FBI is better for something like this. We'll tell them everything. What do you think?”

“Sounds good to me. But first let's get to a motel room or somewhere I can hook up this computer and get the video onto the Internet.”

We spot an Embassy Suites about a half mile ahead. Crystal navigates the car in that direction.

“So now tell me,” I say to her. “How is it that you went through the machine?”

“It was an early test. An early human one, I mean. We all knew the original wasn't disturbed by the scanning process, so it wasn't really a risk. This was after I left Stanley, when I was just beginning to see Rodrigo. I wanted to make him happy. He was really persuasive. He made up some kind of crap like the machine would only be successful if it could flawlessly transmit real beauty. Some kind of shit like that. And since there wasn't a risk, I didn't see the problem.”

“And when you saw what he did, how he made a copy of you, that's what turned you against him?”

“Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“Stanley found out about Rodrigo and me.”

She pauses for a moment. I think I know where she's going with this.

“He killed her. Stanley did. At least that's what Rodrigo told me. Hunted them down one night, followed them to Rodrigo's house in Lewisville, and then broke in when everything was quiet. Caught them in the act, if you know what I mean. Stanley pulled her off the bed and gutshot her. Made Rodrigo watch her bleed to death.”

“My God.”

“Yeah. And the next day Stanley showed up at the office in Plano with a copy of her.”

It hits me then—finally now, in sharp, bright Technicolor—just what the transmission machine can do. All the talk about outfits of super-soldiers seemed so abstract to me, so unabashedly sci-fi, but here is a real-world application that leaves no doubt about the nature of their invention. King and Batista are monsters.

“So that copy was you.”

“Actually, no. He assembled me, but I figured out what happened and ran from him. So he had to make another one.”

“What . . . I mean, how did you know? When did you realize you weren't you?”

“I was confused at first. When I woke up in the research facility, I thought I had just finished the initial test. My last memory was Rodrigo and Stanley, a bunch of NeuroStor officers, and a few technicians watching me step into the machine. In other words, a whole lot of people were there. But when I woke up, just Stanley was waiting for me. Not Rodrigo, not the technicians, no one. Only a few lights were on. I was frightened. I asked Stanley what had happened, and that's when he told me there had been a terrible accident. He said my original had been killed in another test, and that they had reproduced me from memory. From when I had tested the machine earlier. They had saved me electronically, after all.”

We have arrived at the Embassy Suites and now sit in the parking lot as she tells me the rest of the story.

“But I knew he was lying, and I told him that. He asked why the hell I was having an affair with Rodrigo. He wanted to know why I had betrayed him, so I knew right then something was up. I decided to cool off and treat him nicely. Actually, you could say I seduced him. Got him into a sort of compromising position and then just ran. Out the door. Out of Dallas. Lee was an old friend and wanted to help me. My brother, Clay, went ballistic when he found out what had happened, so he offered to help. After a while we had a nice little group who wanted to get back at Stanley, and in the process do the right thing by exposing NeuroStor.”

“What about Batista? Didn't you still have feelings for him?”

“I did. Until I found out he had made another copy of me. A copy of me for himself.” She closes her eyes for a moment, seemingly overcome by rage. “That's why Rodrigo had to go manage the office in Houston, because he couldn't very well live in Dallas when he and Stanley had the same goddamn girlfriend.”

“What about your brother? Why was he standing there?”

“I told him Cameron was going in alone.”

“You what?”

“I had to. We could never have taken those supplies without waking him up, and even if we did, he would have intercepted us at the building.”

“And he was willing to ditch his whole plan?”

“I'm the one who got him into this. He did it because I wanted him to. And because it would keep me out of harm's way.”

“So how did you get King involved in this?”

“I didn't,” she says.

“But Batista said your brother—”

“I know,” she says, and the resurgent tears signal that she is telling the truth. “I know.”

Crystal leaps out of the car then and slams the door shut. She comes back a few moments later with a plastic entry key. In the room I type out a brief description of today's events and the MPEG file's place within them. Then I begin sending the message and attached file to every news agency I can think of: NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, CNN, AP, et cetera. I even send it to myself in case this laptop is damaged later. Each message goes separately, as Cameron requested. An hour or so later we reach a Dallas FBI field office.

And begin two weeks like none I've ever lived.

         

The FBI is not as understanding as I'd hoped, at least not at first. It is difficult to make them understand that we are not here to take responsibility for the blast. Finally, we convince them to watch the camcorder footage, first the back story we shot in the duplex neighborhood and then the entire broadcast Cameron made after he left us at the car.

Sympathy from the FBI is not readily forthcoming. The NeuroStor building is a smoldering ruin. The seventh, eighth, and ninth floors are scattered around the building in a three-hundred-yard radius. The northern wall is a pile of rubble on the ground below. Nearby buildings suffered significant damage.

But our video footage intrigues them greatly. They can easily verify that I do not have a twin brother—or any brother, for that matter—and the admissions made by Batista, including his intention to sell the machine to a foreign government, light up the agents' eyes like a winning slot machine.

The FBI is not thrilled that newsrooms across the country already have access to the footage—public broadcast of the video will likely drive other NeuroStor leaders into seclusion—but they are glad to have it, nonetheless.

The MPEG file is first shown by CNN, which plays the footage unedited the same day they receive it. Other networks quickly follow suit, editing various portions of the video for content, and the story quickly becomes the nation's biggest.

Within twenty-four hours all NeuroStor branch offices are shut down. Searches are conducted, producing enough proof to back up our story and Batista's video-recorded assertion.

The following day, at the e-mail address from which I sent the infamous video clip, this message appears:

My dear sister,

I am sorry. When you asked for my help I knew I needed money, but I didn't know where to get it from. I figured I could play those two against each other. So I decided to go to King. He offered to pay for the operation if I took out Batista, so that's what I did.

Now I'm going after King.

I love you,

Clay

I pass the message on to Crystal, who takes the news better than I expect. At least she knows her brother made his decision for a noble reason.

Clay and King remain at large.

         

Misty comes to me in shock, almost unable to believe that for five days a clone of her husband walked the earth. The video footage fascinates her. She asks me about Cameron, but I can tell her little because I really didn't know very much about him. At least not much more than I know about myself.

Crystal is shattered by what happened—by her brother's disappearance and the loss of Cameron—but for a long time she refuses to talk about it. I heard them that night, of course. I heard them make love. They tried not to make a lot of noise, but good sex is never quiet. More than anything it pleased me that Cameron could enjoy himself the night before his assault. I was even a little jealous, if I allow myself to admit such a thing.

When the FBI finally absolves us of any wrongdoing—promising immunity in exchange for testimony against NeuroStor in future trials—the requests for interviews are constant and frequent. Crystal and I sign exclusivity agreements with NBC and are interviewed by them on several different occasions. The news personalities treat us like heroes, especially me, and when I am asked how it feels to have exposed such a huge and dirty secret, I always answer the same way: I didn't do it.
He
did it. My friend, Cameron Fisher.