The Clone Assassin (16 page)

Watson entered Tasman’s lab at 19:30 that evening, with three bodyguards in tow.

Acting president or not, he submitted to the voice-and-eye security procedures as well as passing through the posts for a DNA scan.

Tasman waited in his motorized wheelchair just beyond the posts, an amused grin on his wrinkled-linen face. He asked, “Do you have a problem with the posts?”

Watson said, “I’m tired. It’s been a long day.”

Tasman smiled all the more. “Perhaps you weren’t built for running empires.”

“I didn’t ask for the job,” said Watson.

“And yet, you have it. Interesting that a natural-born with no ambition has become the president of a synthetic empire.”

Several of Tasman’s assistants remained in the lab. They were scientists, but they behaved more like mathematicians, relying on computers more than microscopes.

Watson said, “Maybe we should go to your office.”

“Travis, this is the most secure area in the most secure building in the Enlisted Man’s Empire. What could possibly be so important that we can’t discuss it here?” asked Tasman.

“It’s about Freeman.”

“Maybe we should go to my office,” said Tasman. He led the way, steering his wheelchair with the little joy lever built into the right armrest. Tasman’s chair rode on six free-axle wheels, almost like a tank running on treads. Tasman’s wheelchair weighed nearly three hundred pounds.

As they moved toward the office, Tasman looked back, and said, “I’ve never understood why you and Harris place so much faith in Ray Freeman.”

He steered through the door, waited for Watson, then sealed the door by pressing a button on the armrest of his wheelchair.

Watson said, “Hold it.”

“What?”

“I’m keeping my security with me.”

He said, “You’re bringing bodyguards into my office for a chat? Travis, I’m flattered. A big man like you, I shouldn’t think you’d need protection from an old man like me.”

Knowing he should ignore the comment, Watson took the bait. He said, “They go with me wherever I go.”

Then Watson changed the subject, and said, “Freeman saved your ass on Mars. You’d be dead or working for the Unifieds if he hadn’t saved you.”

“Ray Freeman is a wealthy man. Did you know that?” Tasman didn’t leave Watson time to respond. “He’s one of the wealthiest men alive. The Unified Authority paid him one billion dollars for his participation in the war against the aliens. He made millions killing Morgan Atkins’s believers before the Avatari arrived.”

“How do you know the Unifieds didn’t take their money back when Freeman joined the clones?” asked Watson, not that he thought it mattered. He didn’t care if Freeman was rich; more power to him. He would let Tasman play his mental games for another minute or two, then he would ask about factions. He had come at Freeman’s direction, but he had questions of his own. He wondered if possibly there might come a day when the converted clones would return to the Enlisted Man’s Empire.

Tasman said, “I looked into that. It’s amazing what you can find out using Pentagon computers.

“The Unifieds haven’t touched Freeman’s money. He’s still a billionaire, so the question remains, Why would a mercenary like Freeman risk his life fighting for clones?

“Why did he come to Mars? At first I thought that the clones had hired him, but they didn’t know he was there.”

Watson confessed, “I thought you hired him?”

“Me? I didn’t know he existed.”

Watson searched for explanations, but none came to mind. “How did he know about you?” Watson asked. “You’re highly classified.”

“Good question,” said Tasman. “Harris and Cutter didn’t know about me. They didn’t send him. Unless you know something I don’t, I think we can both agree that no one but Harris and Cutter had the authority to hire him. That means that Freeman decided to go to Mars on his own.”

Watson thought about it and saw the logic.
If nobody sent him, he must have gone to Mars on his own,
he agreed. “What’s your point?”

“He’s not in this for the money.”

“Probably not,” Watson conceded.

“If he’s not after money, then perhaps he’s doing this for sport,” suggested Tasman.

Watson dismissed the idea. “Maybe it’s his moral compass. Harris told me he joined the EME because they were evacuating planets that the Unifieds abandoned to the aliens. Harris used to call him a ‘homicidal humanitarian.’”

“Did he go to the New Olympian Territories to save lives?” asked Tasman. He smiled as he asked this, his teeth the color of a stormy sky.

“He went to look for Harris.”

“And what is he doing now?”

Watson felt cornered. Rather than lie, he changed the subject. He said, “Freeman heard something about converted clones fighting against the Unified Authority. He says that the clones who attacked Harris were reprogrammed clones who were fighting against the Unifieds.”

Tasman knitted his fingers and furrowed his brow. He asked, “Wouldn’t they have been working for the Unified Authority? I mean, if anything, wouldn’t the Unifieds want Harris dead?”

“Freeman says they were working against the Unifieds.”

“Working against the Unifieds . . . and they weren’t working for us, not if they attacked Harris. Their programming would have prevented them from attacking Harris,” said Tasman.

“This is an unexpected turn.”

Tasman placed a bony white hand across his pale lips and stroked his cheek with fingers so gnarled that his knuckles looked like the burls of an ancient tree. “Ours could not have attempted the murder, not without tripping a death reflex.”

“They weren’t ours,” said Watson.

“Factions within factions,” Tasman whispered. “I always wondered what would happen. I don’t know if this is good news, but it certainly could work out for the best.”

“What?” Watson demanded.

“Neural programming is an immature science, something we developed as we went along. Apparently, our successors face similar problems.

“Whenever they’ve reprogrammed clones, they’ve left bodies behind. Do you know what that means?”

“They’ve triggered death reflexes,” said Watson.

“Yes . . . yes. Watson, clones die when they discover they are clones. That is why we program them so carefully to avoid killing them.

“When the politicians called for new clones to replace the Liberators, they wanted extensive programming . . . sometimes the programs caused conflict. They wanted fighting machines that would never attack their makers unless their makers declared independence. They weren’t meant to kill humans; they were created to attack aliens if we ever found any. By the time we finally encountered aliens, the clones had been fighting nothing but humans for decades.

“They have programming in their brains that forces them to follow orders, right? They also have programming in their brains that tells them they are natural-born. What would happen if an officer ordered a clone to acknowledge he was synthetic?”

Watson thought about this. Conundrums. He’d enjoyed playing with paradoxes as a boy. One of his favorite paradoxes had been, “If God can do anything, can he create a rock that is too big for him to lift?” Those had been juvenile mental masturbations. Now he faced a conundrum that could bring down an empire.

He looked through the office window. The aides outside working at their computers were all clones.
What if I went out and told those aides that they are clones?
Watson asked himself.

“What happens if you tell a computer to shut down and to do a mathematical equation at the same time?” asked Tasman.

“It tells you it has a program running and asks you if you still want it to shut down.”

“And if you do?” asked Tasman.

“It shuts down,” said Watson. “It shuts down without finishing the equation.”

“Which is precisely what happens when you reprogram a clone,” said Tasman.

“What are you talking about?” asked Watson.

“Those clones have hundreds of programs etched into their brains, some active, some dormant, some complementary and others conflicting. Some programs carry priority scripting that makes them able to override other programs. The way we designed their brains, their minds work just like computers.

“Think about it. What would happen if somebody tried to override the programming in a computer by introducing a random protocol? What if you told the computer, replace all programs written in a certain language with programs written in another language? You might not disable all of the programs that you wanted to disable, and the surviving programs might override the programs from the second language.”

Tasman picked up a notepad and scanned over files. He mumbled, “So many programs . . . so many things that can go wrong.” The man seemed energized.

“But they’re clones. They’re all exactly alike. Wouldn’t they all have the same reaction?” Watson asked as he turned to watch the clones outside the window. To him, they looked as indistinguishable as ants.

“There is a colonel in the Marines; I believe his name is Hunter Ritz. Have you met Ritz?” asked Tasman.

“I’ve met him,” Watson said, turning to face Tasman again. “He’s the ranking officer in the Corps right now if you can believe it. Harris was negligent about promoting officers. He didn’t spend time on administrative functions like promotions.”

“And you worked for Admiral Cutter?”

Watson nodded. “Sure.”

“How would you have described Cutter?”

“Stiff, formal, a by-the-book sort of officer.”

“And Ritz? Is he a by-the-book-type Marine?”

Watson laughed. “He’s like a kid who never grows up. Everything is a game to him, even war.”

“What about General MacAvoy?”

“Not the brightest man I’ve ever met.”

“Is he as smart as Cutter?”

Watson laughed. “MacAvoy? The man’s a hammerhead. I’ve seen blocks of wood that were brighter.”

“And yet he and Cutter started out with identical brains created out of the exact same DNA. They have the same programming, too,” said Tasman. “We didn’t create Marine clones and Navy clones. We created military clones.”

“So why did MacAvoy come out like MacAvoy and Cutter come out like Cutter?” asked Watson. “That doesn’t make sense.” He asked the question though, in the back of his mind, he jokingly wrote MacAvoy off as a product of brain damage.

“That’s what happens with low-priority programming,” said Tasman. “We arranged their brains so that experience would override low-priority programming. We needed some clones to become Marines and some to become soldiers and others to become sailors, right? We needed them to think differently, to act differently, to develop different skills.

“I expected their programming to be more stable. I thought they would all have similar personalities, but their experiences began overriding the low-level scripts right from the start. Some clones showed signs of aggression by the time they were three. Some were more studious.

“If the scientists that the Unifieds have assigned to this task still have a one-size-fits-all mentality, they’re going to kill more clones than they convert,” said Tasman. “During the alien war, a number of clones acted out against higher-priority programs. There were acts of vandalism and insubordination. The vandalism, that’s a midlevel programming problem, but it’s associated with insubordination . . . they’re not supposed to be able to act up under any circumstances.

“I’d need a few live specimens and a team of psychologists to pinpoint the problems. We both know I will never have an opportunity like that.

“You know, Watson, I was already retired by the time the Avatari came, but I heard about New Copenhagen. I always wondered how it was that clones came to ignore their programming. Until this moment, I never figured it out.”

Watson said, “From what you are telling me, it sounds like the Unifieds have a problem on their hands.”

The chilled air carried a chemical scent. Watson noticed, but didn’t bother think about it. Tasman sniffed, and muttered, “The new air conditioner.” Using his arms to brace himself, he managed to stand in his wheelchair so that he could peer over Watson’s shoulder. He looked, dropped back into the chair, then motored around Watson for a closer look.

The scent smelled like chemicals.
Janitors?
Watson asked himself.
Is that smell cleaning supplies?

The clones in the office had all collapsed without a struggle. Tasman, who had programmed this reaction into their brains, had never seen it put to the test. He stared across his laboratory fascinated and terrified.

One of Watson’s bodyguards, the natural-born, opened the door. He said, “We need to go.”

Watson started to ask what had happened, but he knew. He saw the lab workers lying on the ground and slumped across their computers.

The bodyguard looked at Tasman, and asked, “You created their programming, is that right?”

“I did,” Tasman answered, still staring at the fallen clones.

“How much information will they remember when they wake up?” asked the bodyguard. When Tasman didn’t answer, he grabbed the old scientist by his collar, and repeated, “Will they remember names and addresses when they wake up?”

Tasman shrugged his shoulders, and said, “Everything.”

“Will the bodyguards remember they were bodyguards?”

“Yes.”

“Will they remember briefings?” the bodyguard asked, now holding a pistol in one hand.

“Yes. Yes, they will remember their names and their missions and their orders . . . everything,” said Tasman. “They will remember what they were doing in this lab and what they discovered. The only thing they won’t remember is the reboot itself.”

Without saying a word, the bodyguard stepped out the door and fired bullets into the skulls of the two clone bodyguards.

Watson jumped as if startled from a deep sleep.

“We need to go,” said the bodyguard.

“Go?” asked Watson.

“Now!” shouted the bodyguard.

“Howard, you need to come with us,” said Watson.

“We’re not dragging that chair,” said the bodyguard. He swept the room with his pistol, looking for any sign of movement. Outside the door, the two dead bodyguards lay in bright red puddles of their own blood. The other clones would soon wake, but not the clones on Watson’s security team.