“So, when it’s raining outside?” Con asked.
“It’s raining in here,” Abigail confirmed. “If we ‘opened’ the windows, you’d even hear birds chirping, crickets at night. A small thing, but it’s important to feel connected to the outside world.”
“How long did all this take to finish?” Con asked, looking down the two hallways that led away into the complex.
Abigail took a seat at one end of a long dining table. “Well, nothing is ever really finished. There are always improvements to be made. Upgrades. Work goes slowly when you have to cover your tracks. Everything had to be outsourced. We’ve used close to three hundred subcontractors, each hired through a different holding company. The logistics alone were enough to drive a person to drink. But to your question, primary construction began in ’33. Yes?” Abigail looked to Cabigail for confirmation. “That would make it seven years ago now. The complex has been habitable for five.”
Seven years. Two years before Vernon Gaddis’s plane crash. Con looked around, almost admiring the terrible and deliberate purpose with which her aunt had planned for today. She finally understood why the entire family had been given clones. It hadn’t been to rub their faces in Abigail’s success. That had all just been a sideshow. Only Con had mattered. And in the wake of her accident, she had predictably accepted the gift. It made her wonder how much of her last three years had been manipulated by her aunt. How long had she been a rat running her aunt’s long-form maze? How much of what she thought she knew was true, and how much was part of the Abigails’ design? Even her lag had played its part, driving Con forward recklessly. A windup machine in thrall to her broken programming, she had delivered herself, willingly, right to her aunt’s doorstep.
“So what’s the story? I thought you couldn’t have a clone,” Con said.
“Well, no, I couldn’t back in ’27,” Abigail said, as Cabigail sat down beside her, her hand resting lightly on the table so no one would forget who had the gun. “The excess copper buildup in the brain characteristic of Wilson’s disease played absolute havoc on uploads. It was impossible to get a clean image. Took until ’33 to solve it. As diversions go, though, it proved just about perfect.”
“And you decided to hide that discovery from Palingenesis,” Con said, sitting at the far end of the table where she could see both of them.
“By then, the company had demonstrated that it was an unreliable steward of my vision,” Abigail said. “I no longer felt beholden to share my progress with Vernon.”
“Which, I’m guessing, is also why you never told anyone that you solved the mind-body problem. You have, right? I’m guessing that wasn’t just a lie to torment Brooke Fenton. Seeing as how you’re in my body and all.”
Cabigail looked down at herself and chuckled. “Good point. But, yes, I’ve . . .” Cabigail paused and looked apologetically at Abigail. “We’ve come a long way since ’27. Back then, the mind-body paradox appeared insurmountable. We could clone a human being, but only like for like. Same body. Same age. Which was fine as far as it went, but that was never the goal. We kept at it for years. But no matter what we tried, the lag between clone and original was always the limiting factor. And forget about moving a consciousness from one body to another. That had a survival rate of zero.”
“And yet here you are.”
“You know how long we’ve been waiting to tell someone? It’s not easy to keep a secret like this. Some days I just want to burst from excitement.” Cabigail’s eyes blazed like twin lighthouses. “You understand what this means, don’t you? The best Palingenesis can offer is half measures—an insurance policy against death. But its clients would continue to age and eventually die. Now, the true immortality of the human conscience is within our grasp. With your help, we can make it a reality.”
“You really did it,” Con said, still struggling to wrap her mind around the enormity of what that meant. If Abigail could transfer her consciousness to a younger body, then she could theoretically live forever, playing hopscotch from one new body to the next for a thousand years. It would rewrite what it meant to be human.
“Well, not yet, no,” Cabigail qualified. “We’ve had limited success with jumps between close genetic relations—an aunt and her niece, for example—but even this pairing has a shelf life. But it should give me enough time to perfect the process.”