CHAPTER 3
LEVERAGE AND INSURANCE
Fiona’s assistant Maria entered the office. She looked down at her boss, awaiting instructions.
Fiona said, “Show him the Quarry.”
Ephraim glanced at Fiona but looked back as Maria bent to open a low cabinet. Inside was a safe, a keypad, and a smaller box — apparently anchored to the bottom of the safe — that required a fingerprint to access.
Maria reached into the box and straightened. She turned and stood before Ephraim with her hands out flat, a small arc-shaped black device resting on her palms.
“This,” Fiona said as if she were holding the thing, “is a device deep in Riverbed’s R&D, fully functional but very much not ready for primetime. We call it Quarry, and it’s something Wallace Connolly — rest his soul, apparently — would very much like to have seen reach the light of day.”
Ephraim looked at the device. It was thin, about the size of a hair clip, like matte black metal in the shape of a flattened rainbow, thin in the middle, with larger flat areas on each end.
Maria held it out farther. Ephraim decided he was being asked to pick it up. The item was feather-light, easy to forget he was holding.
“What is it?”
“The reason Wallace and I parted ways.”
He’d heard rumors about Fiona and Connolly, about Eden and Riverbed, about animosity and secret cooperation. But this was the first time he heard any of it from Fiona’s mouth.
“We worked together, once,” Fiona said, reading Ephraim’s disbelief. “Wallace had different ideas about where he wanted to take our research. What’s more, he and I didn’t share the same …” She sighed. “… the same moral imperatives. We parted on friendly enough terms, but they didn’t stay friendly long. Wallace sequestered himself on Eden, and I diverted what we had into Riverbed. But just a few years later Wallace realized that he didn’t have a grasp on an essential element. Something I was project lead on, and that Wallace, apparently, didn’t fully understand.”
Ephraim looked down at the device.
“It’s a mind-mapping system,” Fiona explained. “You’ve heard that thought is simply electrochemical impulses, like a wetware computer?”
Ephraim nodded.
“We, like many researchers, wanted to map a human mind way back when others were mapping the genome. We, like those other researchers, figured it was only a matter of time. Why couldn’t we map minds? The brain is all binary impulses, like a computer’s ones and zeroes. But we kept hitting walls, just like everyone else. Because as anyone with a brain could tell you, objective thoughts aren’t higher-level thinking. It’s one thing for a brain to store data, but ‘emergent properties’ like personality, emotion, and the memory conditioning that makes us who we are — well, that’s something else entirely.”
Ephraim nearly flinched at the word conditioning. Jonathan had talked about it like programming: garbage in, garbage out. You could clone people with enough scripting and conditioned response. Ephraim, looking back, sure had been fooled into believing that Clone Jonathan was the original.
“Quarry is Riverbed’s answer to mapping an entire mind, including emergent properties. Getting it perfect was far from simple, and what’s in your hand is the seventeenth generation of tech that began as what looked like a car-sized hairdryer helmet. It’s also, I’d guess, the reason for the flaws in Eden’s clones. You said the ones in the Islet 09 lab were like statues. Empty shells?”
“They just stood there. No personality.”
“And the Altruance clones who chased you. You said they were like animals? Barely even people?”
Ephraim nodded.
“Based on what I’ve seen of Eden’s work — and unfortunately, it’s far from comprehensive, limited only to what the cloned version of your brother saw — Wallace’s stumbling block was always the mental one. Eden has a process for transferring memories, but it’s not nearly as good as Quarry’s. Eden’s process seems to be incredibly slow and piecemeal. If I had to guess, it’s done in stages, with the last ‘Tomorrow Gene process’ being just the final step.”
“You say ‘Tomorrow Gene’ like it’s not a real thing.”
“I’ll speak straight,” Fiona said, half-sighing. “I don’t think Eden has the ability to rewind the clock for its clients. I don’t think they can make people young again. They can do some light genetic refurbishment, like what they did to you. You look good, Ephraim, but you don’t look twenty. And that’s probably what they’re doing on the primary islands, for guests who want a simpler spa package. It's just a simple refurbishment and repair.”
“But we’ve seen young people who used to be old before they went to Eden. Like Alma Couch.”
“That’s right,” Fiona said. “And you just reminded me that you saw a young Altruance and young Sophie who nearly convinced you that they were the originals, made young.”
Ephraim nodded slowly. He should have connected the dots by now and was shocked to realize he hadn’t.
“You’re saying that none of the ‘young-again celebrities’ who’ve come back from Eden were actually the people who went to Eden. They can’t make old people young. They can only make clones.”
“Exactly. The ‘young Alma Couch,’ from what I see in Eden’s research, is almost certainly a clone. Same for the others.”
“Where’s the original, still-old Alma?”
“Who knows? Maybe she stayed on Eden, on the Denizen. Or maybe it’s more sinister than that. Maybe the originals are somehow disposed of.”
Fiona took the driving straw and adjusted her chair to face Ephraim.
“Do you know what Eden is, most of all?” she asked. “It’s Oz. I think most of what you saw there was smoke and mirrors, with Wallace — even after he died — playing the man behind the curtain. There’s the truth of Eden, and then there’s the spectacle they’ve created to show guests and make it seem like magic.”
“Why?”
“To obscure the truth? To command higher prices? I honestly don’t know. It’s all so different from the Wallace I knew. Wallace was practical, not showy. But to be fair, I don’t know how long Wallace has been dead, and how long the guy you met — Neven — has been in charge. But it makes sense, don’t you think? You saw the Enchanted Forest room, and Sophie and Altruance getting their treatments in a simple room in utilitarian-looking tanks. Who knows what might have come next if you hadn’t pulled them from those tanks? Maybe techs would have woken them up and sent them to the Denizen. Or maybe they never would have woken up at all.”
The image that followed Fiona’s posit chilled Ephraim to the bone. Rows and rows of Tomorrow Gene clients preserved in warehouse tanks, suspended just in case Eden ever needed their bodies or gene sequences again.
Ephraim nodded down at the Quarry device. “What does any of that have to do with this?”
“Eden doesn’t accept someone on a Tomorrow Gene vacation the second they ask for one,” Fiona said, turning her attention to a screen filled with compiled notes on Evermore’s process. “From what I’ve seen, there are months of preliminary treatments before any guest is allowed to visit Eden. They tell their clients that those visits are for prep, but I suspect they’re putting them under and using that time to start the mental reconstruction, take DNA samples, and initiate the process of growing the clones.
“In order for any of Eden’s clones to be convincing — for an Alma Couch clone to be ‘Alma enough’ to be useful as a sex clone — Evermore must be able to reproduce ‘Alma’s mind’ to some degree. It’s not a perfect process; like you said, Jonathan’s clone was ‘off’ enough that you eventually saw through him. Your brother’s clone was close, but he wasn’t your brother. His memories were suspect and incomplete; the small pieces of his true personality just weren’t quite right. I think that’s because Eden’s cloning process still has major problems. Their clones have big mental flaws. They don’t have all the host’s memories. They remember things that didn’t happen, remember incorrectly, or don’t remember entire swathes of the host’s history.”
Ephraim nodded. He remembered Jonathan’s mental flaws just fine.
“The bigger problem was that Wallace’s way of mapping minds was incredibly slow. I’m talking molasses, and that’s on top of its lack of fidelity. I’ll bet Evermore failed to create a viable mind far more often than it succeeded.”
“That might explain the ‘ghosts’ I saw,” Ephraim said.
“Consider Alma. Alma probably went into a local Evermore clinic for her first ‘treatment’ six months before ever going to Eden, and Evermore techs copied a piece of her mind. When she returned, they copied a little more, and so on forever. Only when they were sure they had ‘Alma’s mind’ mostly handled did they accept her onto Eden for her ‘rejuvenation treatment.’ That’s when they finalized the copy, checked its fidelity, and uploaded it into the clone body they had already grown.”
“But the blanks. I saw Alma blanks, and others who’d already gone through the full treatment.”
“They probably keep stock on hand. They have a copy of Alma’s mind on a computer somewhere. Whenever someone orders an Alma, they upload her mind into a fresh body. Keeping them blank probably makes them easier to handle and store. The real Alma Couch probably wouldn’t appreciate being locked up and held in a cell, after all.”
Ephraim looked down at the Quarry device, noting that Fiona hadn’t answered his question. She’d told him all about Eden’s memory-transfer process, noting its problems, but she hadn’t said a thing about her own.
Ephraim handed it back to Maria, wondering at all the assistant-caregiver was hearing. Was Fiona holding anything back? Or did Maria, who had to act as Fiona’s hands, know it all?
Instead of returning the Quarry to Fiona’s safe, Maria set it in a slim metal box, secured it by closing a latch, and handed it back to Ephraim.
“It’s yours,” Fiona said.
“What am I supposed to do with it?”
“I can’t have you searching the internet for celebrity sex slaves. If this man Neven is out there, he’s smart enough to have people looking for you — and that’s not even accounting for the FBI, who might be watching you as well. But I understand. You need leverage, and you’re not going to feel comfortable talking to Hershel Wood no matter what I say about him owing me favors. So, don’t search the web for proof. Search Hershel instead.”
Fiona glanced down at the box.
More dots connected. Apparently, this was the answer.
Search Hershel instead.
“You want me to …”
Ephraim couldn’t say it. This was as crazy as evil clones. “To what?”
“Meet with Hershel Wood like GEM wants. Maybe he’ll play straight because he owes me, but just in case he doesn’t?” A smile touched her lips. “Find a time to use the Quarry on him. Do that, and we’ll know everything he knows. Everyone’s hiding something, Ephraim.”
“You want me to copy his mind so you can blackmail him?”
“Just as insurance.”
“How long does it take?”
“Thirty minutes, give or take.”
“There’s no way. I can’t even imagine how I’d—”
“Find a way, if you want to get out of the mess you’re in,” Fiona said. “There’s another way to hack Wood, but it’s far messier and slower and probably wouldn’t work. I’d have to try and hijack his MyLife frequency to siphon what we need. But that way is dodgy, requires calling in a lot of favors, and takes weeks to drip.”
“You can hijack a MyLife?”
Fiona’s expression said, don’t ask. But he already knew the answer. The Jonathan clone’s MyLife was being hijacked now. The only difference was that that the dead clone was no longer attached.
Ephraim looked at the box containing the Quarry. If Fiona was right, the plan wasn’t terrible. If he could get Hershel’s secrets, then he’d end up playing ball by default.
The only problem was Fiona — and the fact that even if Ephraim believed what she said, he didn’t trust it.
“I have ideas for how you can sedate Wood and get the Quarry on him. Maria will explain how it works and take you through it.”
Ephraim thought, weighed Fiona’s gaze, then extended the Quarry box toward Maria. “No. I won’t do this for you.”
“It’s for you, not me. Once you have Wood’s mind on record, you won’t have to worry about whether he’ll be on your side. This needs to be done, Ephraim, like it or not.”
“No. It’s wrong.”
Maria crossed her arms. The box stayed in Ephraim’s outstretched hands.
Fiona smiled. “Come on, Ephraim. Let’s not pretend you’ve never lied to get what you wanted.”