“Jesus, Jeremiah. There are limits,” she said. “He knows that, and you would, too, if you bothered to pay attention. I’ve already told him that he can play until he goes to bed once he’s done his homework. He needs his downtime, you know.”
“Yeah, well, now there are more limits. What’s so wrong with that?”
Diana had called him unreasonable. Looking back on it, he could understand why.
“I would have liked to apologize,” he told Dr. Young now. “I should have said something. But what could I say?”
Dr. Young was quiet for a moment and looked at Jeremiah as though she might have something comforting to offer. But in typical fashion, she didn’t, and only gave him another question.
“How long have you and Diana been married?”
“Almost sixteen years.” As he said it, he was struck by the fact that it would be his clone celebrating his wedding anniversary in a few months.
“And Parker, he’s sixteen?”
“Yes, last month actually.” Jeremiah noted a look of mock surprise on her face. “I think I can see where this is going,” he said. “Yes, we got married in a hurry. But you do what you need to do, right? I don’t think any of this is relevant to the experiment.”
“Everything is relevant to this experiment, Jeremiah. I’m simply trying to establish some background. We need that.”
“Seems to me you got all the background you needed when we took the Meld together. Wasn’t that the idea of taking it before the cloning? To get a baseline? Some background?”
“Well, yes,” she said, “but the Meld doesn’t always give a complete picture. And what we do glean from it is somewhat dependent on what you’re thinking about at the time it’s administered. It isn’t a precise science.”
“From what they told me this morning, that drug is a hell of a lot more precise than I ever thought it was,” he said. “Did you know it can be used to implant false memories? That’s what they did to the clone.”
“It works differently in that scenario,” she explained. “With a physical connection everything can be recorded and manipulated as needed. The way you and I use it, it isn’t anywhere near as exact. I can control it, but not to that extent.”
“What good is it, then?”
“It’s extremely useful,” she said flatly. “It offers a sharing of feeling, thought processes, impulse reactions, things like that. More importantly, for our purposes, it illuminates self-perception and self-awareness. It affords me a glimpse of how you see yourself in the world.”
Inwardly, Jeremiah began to understand how Meld could be so dangerous. It seemed like something no one ought to see.
“How?” he asked. “I mean, how the hell does it actually do that?”
“The science is hard to explain in laymen’s terms,” she began. “But essentially, Meld does different things to the brains of the people who take it—the Meld I take chemically stimulates mirror neurons in my brain. That’s what makes empathy possible—like when you see someone yawn and then you can’t help but yawn yourself. That’s because of mirror neurons. It gives me a picture of what’s going on in your mind and, in a way, lets me experience it.”
“And what about the drug you give to me?” he asked. “What does that do?”
“Among other things, it inhibits your own self-perspective. It filters out all those little lies we tell ourselves about who we are, how other people see us. It allows me to see the truth. And to some extent, it allows you to see it, too.”
“It sounds a little invasive when you put it like that.”
She smiled slightly. “I suppose it is,” she said. “But Meld doesn’t divulge everything. And because of the interplay between our minds, it’s never as exact as I’d like. There’s always the need for me to interpret some of what I see. If you want the more specific background, the details, sometimes simple conversation is still the best route.”
Jeremiah had the impression that no conversation was ever simple where Natalie Young was concerned.
“Well, there’s your specific background, then. Diana got pregnant and we got married. We were already talking about it, anyway. This sort of thing happens all the time. It’s not a big deal. Plans change.”
“What sort of plans changed, Jeremiah?”
“You know, just normal plans. We were going to go to London. I had an offer from a newspaper there. But it was risky with a baby on the way, you know, up and moving to another country. She got nervous. So, instead we got an apartment. I got a job on a paper here. We had to put things on hold.”
“For a long time, it seems,” she said.
“We have a son to raise. You make sacrifices. I don’t think that’s so hard to understand, Dr. Young. I certainly don’t think it’s a bad thing.”
“No, of course not. On the contrary. Do you consider yourself a good father, then?”
“Yes,” he said pointedly. “Actually, I do. I’ve been there for Parker.”
“And is that the most important thing?” she asked. “Being there?”
“Well, I’d say it’s a pretty damn good start. That’s what you do if you’re a father.”
“Your own father left when you were...how old?” she asked, looking down at her notes. “Four years old?”
The expectant look on her face gave Jeremiah the impression she was waiting for him to make some breakthrough connection about overcompensating in his role as a father. But he wasn’t going to give in to her cheap psychoanalytic tricks.
“I guess he didn’t want to make those kinds of sacrifices,” he said. “He left my mother to do it on her own. So, I suppose, yeah, I’m one up on him.”
“You’ve told me she was a good mother to you.”
“She was,” he said. “She did a good job with a bad situation. But yeah, she was always a good mother. She is a good mother.”
“And what about Diana?” she asked at last. “Has she been a good mother to Parker? Has she had to make sacrifices, too?”
“Of course she has,” he said. “She was going to go to law school. She wanted to travel. We’ve both had to make sacrifices. That’s what you do.”
“What else have you sacrificed?”
“Well, for one thing, I gave up a career in journalism to work for ViMed. For God’s sake, I just had myself cloned! I’d call that a sacrifice.”
“So, you did this for your family, then?”