“Are you kidding?” Gaddis said with a laugh, all traces of anger magically gone. It was like an exact copy of Vernon Gaddis, gregarious and charming, had tagged into the conversation. “My first month as a clone, I think I slept fourteen hours a day. I wouldn’t get out of bed except to eat. Fortunately, Peter wasn’t with me yet, so he still has some respect for me.”
That felt reassuring to hear. She’d been navigating her new reality entirely on her own, and it was comforting to know that what she was going through was normal.
“How are you feeling? Emotionally?” Gaddis asked now that he’d designated himself her best friend in the world.
“Not great. No one thinks I’m me,” Con said, unsure if she should be confiding in the enemy but painfully aware how much she needed to say it to someone who would get it. The irritating part was she felt certain he knew it too.
He nodded sympathetically. “What about you? Who do you think you are?”
“I don’t know. It’s hard to keep straight in my head.”
“I understand completely. I went through the same thing, and I only had two weeks of lag. You have eighteen months. I can’t imagine how you must feel.”
“I don’t even look the same.”
Gaddis nodded. “Ordinarily, Palingenesis would have given you the option of adding back your tattoos. Scars. Distinguishing marks. Aged your skin. They have two cosmetic surgeons on retainer. It helps, believe me. Sometimes clients opt for a clean slate, but nine times out of ten, they want to look as much like their original as possible. I sure as hell did, and even then, I struggled.”
Con glanced down at her bare left arm. She got that. It would mean everything to look in the mirror and at least recognize the person staring back. “I just feel like I’m losing my mind, you know?”
“I do. And you’re far from alone.” Gaddis exhaled deeply. His fingers, which were tented together, twisted back and forth. “How much do you actually know about your aunt?”
“Next to nothing,” Con admitted.
“She was remarkable. One of a kind. I’m a workaholic, and she made me look like an unemployable slacker. And she was the most brilliant mind I’ve ever encountered, to boot. Thank God she had no interest in business, or I would have been out of a job. We met at a conference in Boston, spring of ’19. She’d done her undergraduate at MIT in quantum computing and had an MD/PhD from Harvard. It was an unusual, heavyweight combination. Her doctorate thesis on human cloning had made a splash, but she’d had no luck attracting investors.”
“Why not?”
“She was, as you say, a piece of work. Investors want to know they can control what they’re buying.” Gaddis smiled at the memory of his former partner. “And Abigail would not be controlled. It frightened a lot of people away. I took a meeting with her as a courtesy to a friend. I had heard the stories and had no expectations that anything would come of it. But then the meeting stretched into dinner. By the time we finished dessert, the entire trajectory of my life had altered. We were going to change the world together. I just never stopped to ask if the world wanted changing.
“When the DoD approached us, it made so much sense. The country’s affection for small wars had spread us too thin. By ’28, the operational cohesion of our Special Forces units had degraded to the point that SOCOM couldn’t meet its international commitments. You have to understand, a single tier-one operator represents years of training and upward of ten million dollars. A sizeable investment to leave vulnerable to an errant bullet.” Gaddis snapped his fingers. “But what if Palingenesis could back up those soldiers? Have a KIA back in the field within a matter of weeks and with minimal loss of training or unit integrity? All that invaluable experience and know-how retained rather than tragically lost. And their families wouldn’t have lost a mother or a father. We were patriots. It was a win-win all the way around.”
“Until they started coming home,” Con said, unsure why she was getting a history lesson. It was a story that everyone in America knew by now. In ’32, the Washington Post had broken the news that a small biotech firm called Palingenesis was providing clone backups for key Special Forces personnel. The news had detonated in the American consciousness, further fracturing an already divided country. The question of what constituted a human life shifted from the hypotheticals of science fiction to the dining room tables of every household in the nation. Traditional political foes found themselves uneasily on the same side of the issue while once unshakable alliances collapsed into warring factions.