Chapter 1
Day 1
The first time he saw his own replica, laid out on a bed, its eyes closed as though it might be dreaming, Jeremiah choked on his own breath. He’d never seen himself from this angle before. There was a slackness to the skin around the jawline; it draped down slightly on either side of the face in a way that was distinctly unattractive. He was riveted—enthralled and repulsed all at once.
“It’s uncanny, isn’t it? The resemblance?” Dr. Charles Scott spoke with his typical detachment, which, in the moment, Jeremiah wished he could share. But that was his own image he was looking at, exact in even the smallest detail. For him, detachment was impossible.
His eyes zeroed in on a dry, pinkish patch on the clone’s left cheek and Jeremiah absently lifted a hand to the same spot on his own face, where he’d scraped himself with a worn razor just a few days ago. Uncanny resemblance didn’t begin to describe what was on that bed.
It was uniquely unsettling, like standing on the face of a mirror. His mind couldn’t work out where his own body began and ended.
“Is it... Is he alive?” Without thinking, without actually wanting to, he reached a tentative hand out to touch his double.
Scott deftly blocked Jeremiah’s hand with his own. “Oh, yes, very much alive. At least in a biological sense.”
His eyes wandered from the face for a moment and only then did Jeremiah notice the steady, slow rise and fall of the clone’s chest.
The thing was breathing.
“What other kind of alive is there?” he asked.
“At the moment, the clone is nothing but a shell. He has no mind, no inner workings. He’s empty.” Scott looked quickly from the clone back to Jeremiah, with an expression that suggested smug satisfaction. “Once we input your neural platform—your memories and synaptic patterns—then he’ll be alive in a more definitive manner.”
“Unbelievable,” Jeremiah said. “It’s really unbelievable.”
“And the whole process shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours,” Scott told him. “Once we administer the Meld you will be neurologically connected until the procedure is complete.”
Almost as if on cue, Dr. Philip Pike entered the room, setting down a tray with two syringes. He barely acknowledged Jeremiah’s presence with a nod, but immediately checked the clone’s pulse and then dispensed something from a dropper into each of its eyes. He made a careful scan of the medical monitors around the clone’s bed and jotted hurried notes on a clipboard. Once he seemed satisfied with whatever the readings told him, he began to affix a tangle of colored wires to various points on the clone’s head. He did all of this in silence and at a pace that might have suggested he had somewhere more important to be, although Jeremiah knew that was certainly not the case. At the moment, he thought, this small hospital room, tucked away in a hidden basement of ViMed Pharmaceutical, was the epicenter of the entire scientific universe—and only a handful of people were privy to that fact. Somehow, inconceivably, Jeremiah was at the heart of the whole thing.
“So, during this transfer,” he asked of no one in particular, “am I supposed to think about anything specific? Is there something I need to focus on?”
“Not really, Mr. Adams.” It was Dr. Pike who spoke, and Jeremiah noted again the tinge of a British accent, something softened and obscured by years of living in the United States. “But you may want to think about a pleasant memory—something you can easily recall—to help with the initial disorientation you may experience under the Meld.”
The prospect of taking the drug again made Jeremiah’s stomach churn. He’d taken it once already with the project’s psychiatrist without any lasting effects, but it had been a strange experience, and he couldn’t shake the idea that it was risky. His fears were ironic, to say the least. As one of ViMed’s marketing managers, he was literally paid to dispel those very notions, persuading the public and the bureaucratic watchdogs that Meld had been thoroughly tested and was perfectly safe. But when illegal street use had erupted in a rash of baffling suicides, his job had grown progressively more difficult. And the most recent suicide wasn’t “just” another junkie. It was a forty-two-year-old housewife from New Jersey who had stabbed herself in the throat with a corkscrew while in the throes of an intimate moment with her husband. The media had gone crazy, and Jeremiah had become acquainted with migraines under the burden of finding a positive spin. She was a regular person, some poor slob who thought a little jolt of Meld might put some magic back in the bedroom. If it could happen to her, he thought, it could just as easily happen to anyone. It could happen to him.
It was one thing to sway public opinion. It was proving harder to suppress his own doubt, though—especially since he now knew the whole truth about Meld—that it had been specifically created for this project, especially made for him, in a way. And he’d have to take it multiple times over the next twelve months. Beside the doctors who were using it in practice, no one had ever done that before, as far as he knew. The implications of being the guinea pig sat on his shoulders like lead.
“Is it okay to take it again so soon?” he asked. “I mean, it hasn’t even been a month since the last time. Are you sure this is safe?”
“Perfectly safe,” Dr. Pike told him. “Under proper medical supervision the chance of any serious side effects is virtually nonexistent.”
The words offered little comfort. Jeremiah had written that company tagline himself. He’d believed it at the time. He had been just as impressed as everyone else at the prospect of a drug that could literally allow a direct link to the human mind. But now, as he waited to be injected again, he couldn’t help but see the whole thing from a different perspective. What if there really was something to it? What if Meld really was doing something to make people want to kill themselves? He didn’t harbor any such desires—not that he knew of at least—but that did little to calm his nerves as he stared at the syringe.
His thoughts must have been evident on his face.
“Mr. Adams.” Charles Scott’s tone was laced with a hint of irritation. “Our scientists have just created an exact replica of you. You are staring into the face of a scientific miracle. A perfect human clone. The Meld should be the least of your concerns. If the FDA can see fit to keep Meld on the market, there is obviously nothing for you to worry about. Of all people, I’d think you’d be the last one to doubt the Meld.”
Jeremiah took his place in a chair next to the bed and tried to swallow his worry. He nearly gagged on it.
Dr. Pike began to connect Jeremiah’s brain to that of his empty double, and he felt a bit as though he were about to be syphoned like a gas tank. But he knew it didn’t work that way. In actual fact, he supposed, it was more like being copied. He began to wonder what his clone would do with all the conflicted thoughts swimming through his mind, all the personal turmoil and philosophical struggle he’d faced in the weeks leading up to this moment. He’d agreed to have himself illegally cloned. He was walking out on his family and leaving a replica in his place. It hadn’t been an easy few weeks. What a thing to wake up to, he thought.