“You’re not even a little bit curious?”
She held the door open for him and stepped onto the sidewalk. The rain had broken for a moment. “It was good to see you again.”
“Apparently you are not.” He paused in the open doorway. “Or is it only because you already know?”
“What is it you want from me?”
“That’s Palingenesis’s intellectual property in your head. I can get a court order to force you to return what’s ours.”
“And my lawyers will have you tied up in court until long after I am gone.”
“If it’s even there anymore,” Gaddis said. “Is that what Abigail bought with her fortune?”
“My aunt’s dead.”
“Yes, so I keep telling myself. Do you have time for a story?” Gaddis asked and then told it without waiting for an answer. “An old friend of mine was in Seoul on business last week. He called me with the most curious story.”
She looked up and down the street, waiting for him to go on. If he thought she was going to play him in, well, he was out of his damned mind.
“He said he saw the spitting image of Abigail in the Namdaemun Market.”
Con felt the hair on the back of her neck prickle.
“Strolled right by him. Clear as day, he said. He tried to follow her but lost her in the crowd. Swears up and down it was her. I had to persuade him that was impossible. There are only so many faces in the world. Eventually they have to start repeating.”
“A look-alike,” she agreed, unsure which of them she was hoping to convince. She had terminated the clone of Abigail in the mountain, but what if she had only triggered yet another clone stored somewhere off-site? Say South Korea. It had been pure hubris to think her aunt hadn’t anticipated something going catastrophically wrong. This was a woman with a backup plan for everything—even herself.
“Exactly. That’s exactly what I told my friend,” Gaddis said. “But it’s a reminder of what a strange world we live in now. So hard to ever say when something is really over anymore. Things we think are dead and buried can come back to haunt us now.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. Goodbye, Mr. Gaddis,” Con said and stepped back into the shop. “I hope lunch with your daughter goes well.”
“Please. Think about what you’re doing. It’s the greatest advance in the history of our species. It’s a gift. It belongs to the world.”
“I thought you said it belonged to Palingenesis,” she said and shut the door in his face.
From the window, she watched him cross the street to his waiting car. Was immortality really an advance, and if so, toward what? She thought she’d prevented it from getting out. Now she realized all she’d done was delay its arrival. Whether her aunt was alive or not made no difference. Now that Vernon Gaddis suspected that immortality was attainable, he would devote himself to finding the answer. Abigail Stickling was a genius, but there would be others who would stand on the shoulders of her work to glimpse what she had discovered. One day, the mind-body paradox would be solved again. It was inevitable. Con saw that now, but she wouldn’t be the one to unleash it on the world. What had Vernon Gaddis called it? A gift? Well, she had very different ideas about gift giving.
Elena, Stephie, and Dahlia returned a little after five with two large pizzas—Dahlia’s reward for the glowing reports from her teachers. She made a big show of counting the guitars in the shop and then lavished Con with a heartbroken face that could have been seen from orbit.
“Can I still have some pizza?” Con asked.
Dahlia pretended to think about it long and hard.
They went out to the courtyard. Elena ran upstairs for drinks, and they sat around the firepit and ate. The evening stretched out. A few friends arrived with wine. Elena arranged a pyramid of logs in the firepit and lit the kindling. The call went out, and still more friends arrived, bearing all sorts of food and drink. Con looked up and realized there had to be thirty people laughing and drinking and telling stories. That was how things usually went when Stephie and Elena entertained—nothing was ever planned, people just showed up until it was a party.
Con camped out by the firepit for most of the night, talking and enjoying the warm glow of human company. Abigail Stickling felt like a distant memory. She dismissed Gaddis’s story as cheap scare tactics. And if she were alive, what could she do to her from South Korea that she hadn’t been able to do in southern Virginia?
Someone asked Stephie if she would play. She declined, but by then it had already begun to circulate that she had agreed.