CHAPTER 57

A NEW WORLD ORDER

Lights flickered. There was a buzzing sound, then a ringing like tinnitus. This part of the process had never been tested — and neither, most perniciously, had the staff heading it. 

So much unknown. At first, all the uncertainty had been about the concept as a whole, but things had changed. Now that the deed was done, it was all about the execution; learning what, if anything, had gone wrong in the process.

Would things be the same? Or would everything be different? 

“Blink,” said a voice. “It’s okay. Your tear ducts are functional, and you’ve been in a nutrient bath. You smell like shit, by the way. Like a baggie full of bile.” 

Eyes opening and closing. There were hands in view, strangely detached from consciousness. They were his own. Hands he’d grown into, gone and now back. 

“You want an invitation? The sooner you’re out of there, the sooner you can take a shower.” 

He looked up. The man in front of him had a shabby brown haircut, untended stubble, a silver watch, a stupid blue tattoo on one arm. His eyes were shifty — so over-the-top that his squirrelly nature almost looked like an act. 

“Mercer. You’re Mercer.” 

The man nodded. “Congratulations. Should I ask you if you know who you are?” 

Eyes closed. There was darkness. Eyes opened. Reality returned in fits and starts. The dream gripped him in soft hands. There had been no in between. He’d thought there might be, but how could you ever know without going all the way through it? Now that he had, the experience was already distant. He’d been in one place, then in darkness, then this new place. No time had passed for him, though it may have for the world. 

Was this what it was like for the others? Or did they arrive into life without any knowledge they’d been asleep, like marionettes with a heartbeat? 

“No. It’s all coming back. I just feel dizzy. Like I’m drunk.” 

Mercer squinted. “You’re sure you’re not drunk?” 

“Very funny.” 

“Maybe you tell me who you are,” Mercer said. “Let me cross that particular question off my list.” 

“I’m Lazarus.” 

“Ha-ha. At least we know the Hopper captures a sense of humor, or lack thereof. You’re still unfunny as hell.”

He stepped out. The space looked like a dungeon. Somewhere beyond these dingy walls, there was blue sky, fantastical architecture, and all the freedom that Eden had so recently lost.

Jonathan probably thought he’d won something now that the island was his. But he hadn’t won anything. Not with GEM snooping through the late Wallace Connolly utopia and all of Eden’s private business. 

The island would die. It would suffocate under new oppression, then draw its final breath. Fortunately, Eden was only a small part of the plan.

Neven looked around the dank room, blinking his brand new eyes.

“Are we at the Domain?” 

“You should know,” Mercer said, “seeing as you had it built. Seeing as you set up the lab to capture digital souls.” 

“It looks like a sex dungeon.” 

“What can I say? I made it my own.” 

“Who’s running the Den back in New York?” 

Mercer shrugged. “Who the fuck cares? Let the Gimp deal with it. The Den is just a decoy now, like Eden.” 

“You had a Gimp?”

“What fancy restaurant doesn’t?”

It wasn’t clear whether Mercer was kidding. 

“When do I get paid?” Now, he wasn’t.

“You haven’t already authorized millions of credits from Evermore’s account?” 

“Jonathan controls Evermore’s account now.” 

“Not the real account,” Neven said. 

Mercer waited. He knew Neven didn’t trust him, but that was fine because he didn’t trust Neven. Mutual loathing was the glue that made this plan stick. 

If Mercer had been able to work out where Evermore’s true wealth was hidden, he’d have found a way to get it without Neven. As things stood, with Neven keeping secrets even his own mental transfer didn’t lay bare, only helping Neven respawn in his new body would get Mercer paid. It was win-win, a devil’s bargain built on a foundation of hate. 

Good enough.

“You haven’t told me if you know your name,” Mercer said. 

Neven waited this time, but Mercer was apparently serious. 

“For Christ’s sake. I know my name.” 

“Then give it to me.” 

Neven wanted to object on principle. 

“C’mon, Champ,” Mercer went on. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve never moved a mind from one body to a new one before. Your old corpse is gathering flies somewhere. Personally, I feel lucky the FedEx guy didn’t open your package, plug the Hopper into his PC, and start spooling off new Nevens. Humor me. Make me believe the upload went right, and that this body that looks like you is you.” 

“Fine. I’m Neven Connolly.” 

“Close,” Mercer said. “Neven Connolly is dead. Turns out, you’re a clone.” 

Neven ignored the joke, true as it was. “Did the transfer work? Is it complete?” 

“Fuck if I know. What’s the last thing you remember?” 

“My final upload into the Hopper. Before I called the Ephraim clone into the room.” 

“You don’t remember dying?”

“It happened after my last upload. So, no.” 

But Neven was curious. Once he fully deployed the Quarry’s technology, this process would be much less clumsy. Real-time DataCrate backups in the cloud would eliminate the need for a slow, hardware-centered Hopper drip. 

It was possible that Neven would be the only person ever to experience a transfer in quite this way. It was disorienting. Back in his original body, he’d intended to goad Ephraim’s clone into killing him so he could escape Eden as a mind without a home, sneaking out on a drive while Agaléga and GEM swarmed the place. It was strange to realize he’d accomplished his goal; and yet, the mind in this new body hadn’t been there to experience it.

“How did it happen?” Neven asked.

“He beat you to death with your tablet.” 

“I thought he’d use the letter opener on my desk. I left it in plain sight.” 

“What can I say?” Mercer said. “Your boy Ephraim was full of surprises.” 

“Did I,” But this was weird to ask, and Neven stalled. “Did I miss anything important between my last upload and my death?” 

But it wasn’t my death, was it? It was my old body’s passing. A copy of me that preceded this copy of me. 

“Want me to get you a MyLife of what happened?” 

“There’s a MyLife record? You mean from the Sophie?”

“Not from her.” Mercer seemed troubled, and Neven wondered, what went wrong with the Sophie Norris clone? She was supposed to be in custody, under control and accessible through the right programming and bribes. But judging by Mercer’s face, that hadn’t happened. 

“I meant from Clone Ephraim. GEM cut out his implant, but I could snag its signal right up until they did.” 

Neven frowned. He’d process these strange feelings later. “Yes. Please. I’d like to see what happened.”

Mercer nodded.

“Is my record intact?” Neven flexed his hands, trying to get the feel of flexing his mind as well. He was a little scattered, but his thoughts seemed whole enough. He felt like he belonged in this body, despite the fact that this same identity was once in another. 

Mercer shrugged. “Dunno. You designed this. You were the one who was so persnickety about the whole ‘dying first’ thing. It’s splitting hairs. Just because the original you had to die for your mind to download into this body doesn’t mean you’re not technically a copy.” 

“It’s different. If there’s only one me at a time, then I’m the original. Just relocated.” 

“If you say so. I think a clone is a clone. ‘Course, the Eden hologram said something about that, while we were waiting for you to download. I think he was trying to make me feel better with your life in my hands.” Mercer laughed. 

“The hologram of my father?” 

“If that’s what you call him. ‘Course, that’s my point, you calling him that. I guess he didn’t mind breaking confidentiality, seeing as you were dead at the time.” 

Neven’s eyes flicked toward pieces of the room’s technology. Intellectually, he knew the AI behind the Wallace hologram was just data and hence could be transferred anywhere, but it seemed strange that it had recently been here, at the Domain, rather than on Eden. But then again, Neven wasn’t on the island anymore — or even the same man he’d recently been. Things in life were meant to change. To evolve, as it were. 

“What did the hologram tell you?” Neven asked, moving to sit on one of Mercer’s chairs. 

“That you were always a clone — a clone of him. Wallace told me that he didn’t have you with a woman. He made you.”

Neven wiped goo from his hands. He felt annoyed. Why had the AI felt the need to say that? The process seemed to have worked just fine from the Hopper to DataCrate, from DataCrate to the new shell body they’d cloned and had ready here, waiting for the moment Neven’s heart stopped beating. 

So far, everything about the process was well — down to Neven feeling like Neven rather than being a duplicate with similar memories. But there were still glitches in the process. The AI was blabbing to undesirables about things Neven would have rather kept secret. 

“I’m his son.” 

“He said you were a clone, just like the others.” 

“The others are grown to adulthood in days, filled with stock memories, and conditioned. I was my father’s first clone. He made me the old-fashioned way. I was cloned as an embryo but grew in a surrogate. I was born as a baby. He raised me. I grew up just like you did.” 

And so what if his DNA was the same as his father’s? What more flattering thing could a father do for his son than to create him in his own image?

Mercer raised his hands. “Whatever you say, Boss.” Then he slapped his legs, clearly uncomfortable. Mercer and Neven had never gotten along, but now they were the only two sharing this secret. “What now. Back to Eden?” 

“No. Eden is finished.” 

“You want to rebuild here at the Domain?” Mercer nodded. “I wondered. The AI said something about that, too. About how his old friend Timothy—” 

Neven cut him off. “There’s a lot of work to do. A lot of misdirection and new ways to go. The Ephraim clone is one proof of concept and this—” He gestured down at his brand-new body, exactly like the old one. “—is another.” 

“You mean the clone that killed you? How is that proof of anything other than his being an asshole?” 

A smile touched Neven’s lips. “I only had to threaten the Sophie clone, and Ephraim stepped right up. What does that tell you?”

“Dunno. What?” 

“That clones are more perfect than natural-born humans. Humankind can evolve over thousands of years, but clones evolve with every iteration. They experience intra-personal evolution. And—” He walked back to the tube that had held his fresh body until his mind had occupied it. There were other Nevens somewhere, all soon to be hooked to a cloud backup of his mind once the Quarry was reverse-engineered. 

“—and now, we can have immortality.” 

Mercer looked uncomfortable. He wasn’t a clone, but Neven had been one kind of clone and was now another — different, from those that Eden had sold. Once his clone blanks were hooked to real-time DataCrate, Neven could never die. Kill one, and he’d instantly download into a fresh one.

A new world order for Neven. For others hiding in plain sight. And for those clients willing to pay for The Lazarus Gene and bask in eternity. 

“So you got the Quarry from the Mauritius police?” Neven asked.

Mercer nodded. He reached onto a shelf for a slim box, removed the delicate-looking instrument inside, and set it into Neven’s hands.

“What is it?” Mercer asked.

Neven stood, looking down at the slim object in his hands. Forget the shower. There was more to do before he rested. 

“It’s what we did all of this for. The reason the Ephraim clone was created. The reason I needed him to follow my subliminal suggestions and come to Eden and provide the way for me to slip away from Eden in a way that assured nobody would be looking for me, and that a scapegoat would fall right into place.”

Mercer waited, arms crossed. He wasn’t appreciating the dramatic build-up. Such a killjoy. 

“This is what will make DataCrate work on a large scale,” Neven said. “I had to drip my mind into the Hopper over the course of months, then have the drive shipped here for you to upload. The Quarry can map a mind in minutes. Once we deploy its technology, we can make backups in real-time, wirelessly to the cloud.” He frowned. “You’ve heard all of this before, Mercer. It’s why there are extra copies of my body. And of other bodies.”

“I’m not so sciency. I just do as I’m told.” 

Neven nodded. That was true. Mercer was a loathsome asshole, but a thief you could count on.

“So where is my good friend?”

“The Ephraim clone? He’s in New York, with GEM. I thought you wanted—” 

“Not him. I’m talking about my other friend.”

“Oh. Just down the hall. The process wasn’t quite the same as yours, though.”

“Are you referring to his extra conditioning?” 

“Yeah,” Mercer said. “You’re still Neven. I just copied your mind into the new body. But he’s … well, you know.”

“Suggestible?” Neven volunteered.

“I was going to say, ‘Brainwashed.’”

Neven didn’t like the word, despite its truth. He motioned for Mercer to lead the way. 

They went down a long hallway much brighter and more sterile than the corner Mercer had made his own. Then through a locked door, down another hallway where finally they arrived in a room full of clone tubes. 

On first glance, Neven saw Aaliyah Bell, Amélie Lajoie, and the two most famous adult actresses in the world: Majestic and Slava. At the end, there was one last tube. In it, he saw a new clone. Beside it hung a dangling cord, a port into which a world-changing device had so recently been plugged.

“May I?” Neven asked. 

Mercer nodded. “He just needs to be woken. He’s ready, like you were.” 

Neven opened the tube. Inside, the clone opened its eyes. 

“What’s your name?” Neven asked. 

It blinked. “Hershel Wood.” It looked around. “Where am I?” 

“Safe,” Neven said. 

He waited, recalling his own disorientation. This clone wasn’t like Neven; it wasn’t a download of one continuous mind. It was a true copy of Hershel Wood, not the man himself in a new place. 

Neven could sympathize with the oddity it must be feeling. A moment ago, that mind inside its head would have felt like it’d been nowhere. Now it was here, blinking for clarity, unsure about everything. 

A brand new clone. A baby of the New Way, superior to the births of the Old Way, just as his father had once envisioned before Neven took the mantle and pushed the cause to its inevitable conclusion. 

“Be patient,” Neven told the clone. “Just wait, and the confusion will clear.” 

It was blinking. Looking around. Lost and alone. 

Neven took the clone’s hand. He met its eyes. And he thought to the heavens: DataCrate is real. It worked, Father. 

Ephraim’s clone had done all he was meant to and then evolved into more. It was an amazing day, a brand new, terrifying, wonderful beginning for them all. Wallace would be proud. 

“I still don’t know where I am,” said Wood’s double.

“It will be all right,” Neven soothed the clone. “It’s okay to be afraid.”