Back in the living room, he picked up the landline phone. It had no dial on it, no way to call out. Before he even put it to his ear, he heard a woman’s voice on the other end.
“Hello, Mr. Adams. Is there something I can help you with?”
“Oh, n-no,” he stammered. “I was just testing the phone.”
“I see. Have you had a chance to go through your provisions? Is everything satisfactory?”
“Yes, yes, fine. They seem to have thought of everything.”
“Well, if you should ever require anything from the outside—specific food, books, even furniture—all you have to do is pick up the phone and we can usually arrange it for you,” she said. “We can handle most requests.”
“Well, I might let you know I probably won’t eat the asparagus. You can cross that off the shopping list.”
“I’ll make a note of it, Mr. Adams. Anything you don’t eat you can deposit in the composter. There’s a small door just behind the kitchen sink.”
“I’ll make a note of that,” he said. “Oh, and that beer you got me, I prefer something simpler. Budweiser would be fine from now on.”
“Noted,” she told him. “But that request was from Mr. Higgins.”
“Mr. Higgins?”
“Yes, Brent Higgins. He’s the data analyst that will be working with you each day. He’s scheduled to come and see you this afternoon.”
“I know who he is. I just wasn’t aware he was going to be making beer requests.”
“Since he’s going to be spending so much time in there with you, I suppose he has a few extra benefits,” she said. “I can get that beer to you by this afternoon. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“Something for a headache, maybe?”
“The medicine cabinet in the bathroom is fully stocked. You should find what you need.”
“I’ll look, then. Thanks. Sorry to bother you.”
“It’s not a bother, Mr. Adams. It’s my job.”
“I didn’t catch your name.”
“I’m Andrea,” she said. “I’m the day shift. At night, you’ll speak to someone else.”
“Thanks, Andrea.”
There were at least three different things in the medicine cabinet that he could have taken for a headache. He was also covered for a sprained ankle, allergies, upset stomach and, apparently, a sudden attack of killer zombie bees. It was as well supplied as any pharmacy. He swallowed two tablets with a glass of water. Then he loosened his tie, took off his work shoes and stretched out on the mammoth bed. It was unexpectedly comfortable.
Despite the headache and the after-effects of the sedative, Jeremiah’s mind raced. He was amazed at the exactness of the clone. Everything about the appearance was precise, right down to the smattering of gray in the hair. And when he’d heard the thing speak for the first time on the monitor, he was struck not only by the voice but the intonation and the slight hesitation before it spoke. It was a habit Jeremiah had noticed in himself. It was positively eerie how accurate it was. And he knew for a fact that the similarities didn’t end there. Aside from the Meld duplicating thought patterns, behavior and the rest, the clone was a perfect copy of Jeremiah inside as well—right down to the molecular level, right down to the slightest cellular makeup. Dr. Pike had seen to that.
The first time he’d met the good doctor, for what Jeremiah had assumed would be a simple routine exam, he’d been put into a room-size scanner, strapped into a severe-looking chair that jerked around by way of hydraulics and had his entire medical history recorded. The machine, created by a team of ViMed scientists and specifically for use in this project, had completed a medical probe unlike anything in history. It detected everything, and left Pike with an exhaustive list of every childhood illness Jeremiah had ever suffered, every metabolic imbalance, every virus, vaccination and injury. It had even picked up on the fact that Jeremiah had broken the same arm twice, once at the age of seven, and again at twenty-two. The injuries had left him with the disturbing ability to rotate his left arm several degrees farther than his right. His clone, Pike had told him, would be able to do the same thing.
“Where did ViMed get the funding to develop tech like this?” Jeremiah had asked, astonished.
“Meld is quite a profitable drug, Mr. Adams,” Pike told him. “Its release provided substantial cash flow for other avenues of research.”
“And just in time, it seems.”
“There are also some well-endowed investors behind this project. Interested parties with deep pockets,” Pike said.
After the scan, Jeremiah had been injected with experimental nanotechnology that had served as a vaccine against any further viral infections and most bacterial illnesses from that point up until the cloning. The measure ensured that he and his clone would start out medically identical in every way. The idea of microscopic robots swimming around inside him had unnerved him, but Scott had only scoffed when Jeremiah asked about it later.
“It’s perfectly harmless, Mr. Adams. If it makes you feel better, I’ve tested it on myself without adverse effect.”
It hadn’t made him feel better at all. In fact, he found it disturbing that Scott would subject himself to untested technology when he must have had a lab full of rabbits at the ready. There was so much about him that Jeremiah found disturbing, though.
It was reasonable, he supposed, in the quiet of the room, that his thoughts drifted to his family. He’d left them that morning and wouldn’t return for an entire year. He hadn’t even been able to say a proper goodbye. During his walk with Louie that morning, he’d lingered a bit longer than he usually did, allowing the dog to sniff every tree they passed and giving him an extra lap around the block. Scott had cautioned him to act normally, not to give anything away by altering his usual routine. But Jeremiah had found that almost impossible. He knew that an imposter—an inhuman copy—would be coming home in his place for dinner that night. He was leaving them in the hands of an untested science experiment. How does anyone act normally knowing that?
So, as Parker brushed by him out the door to make the school bus, Jeremiah had given his son a quick, impulsive kiss on the top of the head, a gesture so out of character that both Parker and Diana had paused and stared at him like he’d just lost his grip on reality. Jeremiah had made a show of shrugging it off. But what, he wondered now, would his clone do with that memory? They had erased the memory of why he’d done it, certainly, but Parker and Diana had seen it. Presumably, the clone would need to remember that moment in case it ever came up in conversation. The effort of wrapping his brain around that enigma wasn’t going to help his headache, he decided, and he almost welcomed the disruption of someone knocking at his front door.