“Come on,” she implored. “Come on!”
With a petulant hiss, the door began to open slowly inward.
Laleh let out a sigh of relief. “Worried they’d locked me out of the system already.” She pushed Con into the dark room. “Make yourself scarce, okay? I’ll stall them, but they will check in here.”
A man’s voice called out, “Hey, who’s there?”
Laleh stiffened. Through the gap, Con saw her turn and walk toward two guards, trying to sound upbeat and loose. “Gabe, hey, you startled me. Give a girl some warning?”
“Laleh? No one’s supposed to be down here this late,” the guard said, sounding almost apologetic.
“I know. But you heard about my epic screwup? Dr. Fenton is on my case to have it written up by the time she arrives in the morning. I need to check the settings in the vault for my report. Won’t take me five minutes.”
“You’re not supposed to be down here,” the second guard said, unmoved by Laleh’s tale of woe. “Are you alone?”
Con took a step away from the door and cast around the vault for a place to hide. Computer monitors lit the room like phosphorescent algae in some underwater cave. She saw a series of identical pods lining both walls of the long, narrow room, the length of a city block. She paused, transfixed, realizing where she was. When a client signed up with Palingenesis, it took months to speed grow a clone that matched the client’s current age. After that, the inanimate clones were stored in hyperbaric, self-monitoring medical pods—wombs, in Palingenesis-speak—where they aged in parallel to the clients, waiting to step into the lives of their originals should tragedy strike. She had read about the wombs but had never seen one. No one outside of Palingenesis had, not even the clients themselves. Staring aghast into the nearest womb, she understood why. If the outside world ever saw clones this way, it would sound a death knell for legalized cloning in America.
You’re one of them.
The mere thought made her want to crawl out of her skin. No, she chided herself. She was from Lanesboro, Texas, northwest of San Antonio. She was twenty-four years old.
A voice like twisted smoke asked her if that was really true.
“I am Constance D’Arcy,” she answered defiantly and pinched the skin of her wrist hard, the way she’d done ever since she was a girl, using the sharp pain to focus herself. Through the glass face of the womb, she could make out the shadowy outline of a naked man, his face sallow and vacant, skin the texture of raw chicken. In the next womb, a redheaded boy, no older than seven, lay dormant. Who would subject a child to this? Con gazed at the boy, a vacant Pinocchio, so realistic, so close to alive down here among all these other misfit creatures. Not people, not yet, the spark necessary to give them life stored on a fantastically large quantum computer elsewhere in the complex. So, what were they until then? What was she now?
Presumptuous meat. That was how Franklin Butler, the founder of Children of Adam and leader of the anti-clone movement, had described them at a rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. At the time, she’d only caught the highlights on her feed and dismissed it as angry rhetoric. But now, from the other side of the divide, Con shuddered at its ugliness. The gulf between witnessing hatred and being its object was as wide as the ocean. Fortunately, or unfortunately, that was a problem for another time. If the security guards found her in here, then everything else was irrelevant. Problem was, despite the size of the room, it offered little in the way of hiding places. The only option she saw was to duck down between two of the wombs and hope the guards didn’t give the vault more than a quick once-over. But, given the outrageous sticker price for even a single clone, she doubted they’d be that careless.
She paused before an open womb, staring up into the empty chamber. Could this have been hers? Out in the hall, the guards’ voices grew louder. They were going to find her and delete her. There was one other place she could hide, although it made her skin crawl even thinking about it. Tugging her T-shirt and bralette over her head, she climbed into the empty womb. She pulled the lid closed, using the hem of her shirt to prevent the locks from engaging. She stifled a claustrophobic sob. Her fingers couldn’t work the laces of her shoes, so the best she could do was to yank her jeans and underwear down to her ankles and pray the guards didn’t linger for long.
A flashlight’s beam swept across the room. Con shut her eyes and held her breath, wishing she could sink down into the gel-cushioned webbing that formed the back of the womb. It went fine until she began to question whether she’d heard the locks engage. What if she were trapped in here? Alive, aware, but mistaken for an inactive clone? Pounding on the glass with no one to hear her. No one to let her out. The thought was so vivid, so terrifyingly real, that spasms began in her hands, as if her fingers were trying to detach themselves and crawl away. She balled them into fists. I am Constance D’Arcy, she reminded herself as the guards neared. Repeating it silently like a prayer, she willed herself to lie motionless. The guard passed her womb without slowing down, but she didn’t dare move until she heard the heavy vault door seal shut with a resolute thud. Only then did she open her eyes.