“What’s with all the wires? There weren’t any wires when I took it before.”
“This is a different kind of connection,” Pike told him. “Normally, Meld acts as a neural stimulant on the brains of both subjects. The clone has no active neurons yet. This is a one-way thing. Think of it as a download. The physical connection is necessary.”
“Besides,” Scott said, “hardwiring prevents the accidental input from anyone else in the room. It wouldn’t do to have the clone picking up random thoughts from me or Dr. Pike.”
Jeremiah nodded and turned his attention to something he hoped would be easier to grasp.
“Does it have to be so cold in here?”
“For the moment, yes,” Pike said without explanation.
“Mr. Adams,” Scott said tersely, “please relax and allow Dr. Pike to do his job.”
He couldn’t relax.
“If the clone is going to know everything in my mind, doesn’t that mean he’ll immediately realize he’s a copy?” Jeremiah asked. “Won’t he remember everything that’s happened up to this moment? The agreement? Our conversations? All of it?”
“I will make sure that doesn’t happen, Mr. Adams,” Pike said. “I’ll be connected to each of you so I can monitor everything that’s going into the clone’s mind. Everything will go from your mind, through me and into the clone. I’ll have full, precise control over the entire thing.”
“When we implant the memories,” Scott added, “we can be as selective as we need to be. All the information about the cloning—every thought you’ve ever had about it—will be withheld from what we insert into his mind. We can filter it. Everything else will be preserved. He will wake up thinking he is—and always has been—Jeremiah Adams. He will remember leaving for work this morning, exactly as you do, and he will remember a car accident. It will all make perfect sense to him.”
“A car accident?”
“We needed some sort of reasonable explanation for the lapse in time,” Scott told him. “We will transfer him to a secluded room in a nearby hospital, which is where he will wake up. There needs to be a reason for that. We have someone taking care of the corresponding damage to your car as we speak.”
“Damage? I’m still making payments on that car!”
“It is unavoidable,” Scott said. “Stop worrying about the trivial.”
“So, he’s going to remember something that never even happened?”
“It’s a false memory,” Dr. Pike explained. “Something lifted from someone else.”
Jeremiah was shocked. “You can do that? You can pick and choose what he’s going to remember?” A whole new set of worries seeped into his mind.
“It is an amazing achievement, that little drug,” Scott said as though that were what Jeremiah had implied. “If we were so inclined, Mr. Adams, we could be just as selective with you. We could wipe out every memory you have of this whole arrangement and even you wouldn’t realize you’d been cloned. But, of course, that wouldn’t serve our needs for the project at all, would it? We need your mind intact.” He shot a tense smile at Jeremiah, which did little to lighten the weight of the insinuation. If Meld could be used to implant precise, tailored memories, the possibilities were endless. And sinister. It made his skin crawl.
If the public had even an inkling of what Meld could actually do, the suicides would almost be beside the point.
Meld had been fast-tracked from the start, and the medical community had gone giddy at the drug’s potential. The ability to actually see into a patient’s mind—even the somewhat foggy glimpse that Meld offered—had implications for all manner of physical and psychiatric mysteries. Jeremiah hadn’t been surprised at how quickly the drug had been accepted. It was a marvel. But had they seen the other edge of that sword, he wondered, or known what Meld was really for, would it have passed the initial trials? More to the point, he thought, would he have been so keen to help push it on the public?
Charles Scott glared down at him with a glint in his green eyes that felt like a warning, and Jeremiah replayed in his head the man’s ambiguous threat during their first meeting several weeks before.
“You now know as much about this project as anyone else involved,” he’d said. “It wouldn’t do to have too many people walking around with this kind of information. Our investors have a tendency to get nervous.”
Although Scott had quickly followed that remark with the matter of Jeremiah’s substantial compensation, there was no mistaking the implication: the moment he’d been told about the cloning project Jeremiah was already in. That first meeting hadn’t been an invitation so much as an orientation, and the contract he’d later signed had been a formality, at best. And the entire thing had done nothing but gain momentum from that moment on.
Dr. Pike continued to affix the wires to Jeremiah’s head. Jeremiah focused on the man’s gleaming black hair and the deep brown of his sure, professional hands, and he struggled to remember the allure of the $10 million payout he’d get at the end of the whole thing. That kind of money could fix a lot of problems. It would change things. The prospect of that fortune had been enough to make him turn away from principles he thought were unshakable. Every man has his price, he supposed.
Somewhere in the back of his mind he also acknowledged the real temptation of a twelve-month sabbatical from his own life. It had seduced him every bit as much as the money had. Maybe more. Between a job that had already begun to make him question his own morals, and a marriage that felt increasingly more like a lie, stress was eating him alive. And into his lap fell a chance to just walk away from all of it—without consequence and without blame. A free pass. He could simply walk away without anyone even knowing he was gone. There isn’t a man alive, he told himself, who would have refused. Despite the ethical question, despite that human cloning was illegal the world over, it would have tempted anyone.
Dr. Pike injected the clone with Meld and then turned wordlessly to Jeremiah with the second syringe poised above his left shoulder.
Jeremiah closed his eyes and rolled up his sleeve.
After the initial stab of the needle, he felt nothing. Which is not to say he didn’t feel anything; he literally felt nothing. Seconds after the injection, he became aware of a total emptiness, like a towering black wave that threatened to sink him into an immeasurable void. The experience was unlike anything he’d ever known. He imagined an astronaut suddenly untethered from his ship, floating helplessly into unending darkness. Without thinking, he immediately felt his body recoil. His mind screamed against it.
I’m dying!
From impossibly far away, he heard Dr. Pike say something about a heart rate and felt the slight pressure of a hand on his shoulder. He couldn’t see anything of the hospital room anymore. He was drowning in the blackness. His chest felt suddenly constricted. He fought just to find his breath.