Authors: G. T. Almasi
I steal another look at the bickering brothers over my coffee cup. “What, you think they’re clones?”
“Well, we
are
looking for Carbon.”
I let Patrick look. I know he’ll want us to follow them, so I wolf down the rest of my breakfast. Buzz and Ponytail finish eating and stand up to leave. Buzz mops orange juice off his pants with a napkin. They carry their cafeteria trays to the kitchen’s dirty plate conveyor belt and head for the door. We drop our trays off at the kitchen and follow the twins outside.
I switch on my infrared to memorize their heat signatures. I only need one, though. Their heat sigs are an exact match. That
is
weird. Normally everybody’s heat signature is as unique as his or her fingerprint.
The twins mosey around the left side of the library, so we swing right. Patrick uses his handheld millimeter-wave radar screen, which allows us to “see” the two guys through the library. Any passersby will think we’re geeky engineering students testing a class project. We follow the twins all the way across campus, primarily tracking them through solid objects. Twice we’re following closely enough that we’ve got our quarry under direct observation, but the risk of detection is minimal since we blend in so well with all the students.
We might just have clones on the brain. Maybe it’s
because we’ve been here for three days and we’re a little desperate. But somehow I can’t escape the feeling that as my grandfather would have said, “There ees something fishlike going on here.”
The twins walk through the front doors of a tall, imposing building labeled “The Chemistry Institute at Zurich University.” We enter the chemistry building in time to see Buzz and Ponytail get on an elevator at the far end of the otherwise vacant marble-floored lobby. After the doors slide shut, we hustle over to see where they go. Trick hands me his radar device, which I use to watch the twins ride down while Trick reads the numbers over the door. “Basement 1, Basement 2 … still on Basement 2 … I think that’s as low as the floor numbers go.”
“Hang on,” I say, “they’re still going down.” I barely see them on the radar screen, but I can tell they stop moving a few seconds later. The twins walk under us, about five floors below. I finally lose them as they walk back under the center of the structure. Trick has already hit the down button. When the elevator returns, we hop in and look for secret panels or hidden buttons. I switch my infrared vision back on while Trick takes back his millimeter-wave radar device and sweeps it over the walls of the car. We can’t find anything out of place. The buttons only show ten floors above us and two basements: B1 and B2.
Patrick reaches into his bag of tricks and pulls out one of his toys. The small device is shaped like a TV remote except for the metallic, bulgy snout on the end. He presses a red button on the doohickey and gets a reading right away.
“Ah hah!” he says. He adjusts some of the dials on his little scanner device. He presses and holds the B2 button with one hand and waves his contraption over the buttons with the other. He rapidly presses the B2 button. Then he presses it a few times slowly, then fast again, all while keeping his eyes on his gadget. He takes his finger off the button for a moment, then presses it three times fast and
three times slow. Then he keeps the button pressed for about four or five seconds, and suddenly the elevator begins to descend. He turns to me with a broad grin.
I smile back at him and shake my head. “I’m not even gonna ask.”
He returns his magic button scanner to his bag. “Amazing, huh?” He preens.
I give him a quick kiss. “Amazing.”
The doors open, revealing the secret sub-sub-sub-subbasement. I’m tempted to pull Li’l Bertha out from under my jacket, but that’ll kind of blow the whole student thing. I pat her under my right armpit and mentally practice quick drawing her.
We face a brightly lit hallway that stretches away for about two hundred feet back under the chemistry building. Two gray doors are spaced evenly along each side. The floor is white linoleum, the walls are painted a light beige, and the high ceiling is a sheet of white acoustic tiles interrupted by rectangular fluorescent lighting fixtures. Huge ventilation pipes, two feet in diameter, poke through the ceiling tiles here and there. They give the place a very industrial look. The air-conditioning is cranked, and the skin on my legs gets goose bumps. We try to appear casual as we walk off the elevator and stroll down the hall.
A loud discussion emanates from the first door on the right. Actually, it’s just one woman’s voice, but the tone in her voice is unmistakable. Someone is getting chewed out big time. It sounds like Cyrus does when he dresses me down for something, except this is even scarier because it’s in German.
I’m still using my infrared vision, which shows me three warm blobs about to enter the hallway from the chew-out chamber. There’s nowhere to hide, so we keep going. I peek behind us as the door opens. The angry woman pushes Buzz and Ponytail into the hallway. The twins hang their heads and stare at the floor passing beneath them while the woman propels them ahead of her.
Angry Lady lowers her voice to a pissed-off, hissing whisper. She warns her sulking charges, “If either one of you ever sneak out like that again, I’ll personally stuff you back in the tanks.” Patrick and I stand to the side. They tramp past us, march down the corridor, and turn right at the hallway’s far end.
One of the classes I took at Camp A-Go-Go was called Overt Stealth Techniques, which was taught by an ancient little man named Dr. Charles. His nickname was the Chameleon because he was the CIA agent who attended Stalin’s funeral as an honored guest of the Soviets. He was even in the official pictures of the event, and naturally he sent marked-up copies of them back to his handlers showing who all the major Russian players were.
Dr. Charles was a master of hiding in plain sight, and something he taught us comes back to me. He said, “The tighter the outside, the looser the inside,” meaning that the harder it is to access a location, the more the people inside tend to relax on security. Clearly, no one in this secret facility thinks it’s possible for a competitor to crack that elevator code, because we don’t get so much as a glance as we resume walking down this hallway.
We come to a big open area on our left. There are six rows of desks, and the room is lined with books and computer terminals. It’s a library. We duck in and sit next to each other at a couple of terminals.
Patrick cracks into the network in nothing flat. His fingers come up to full speed and blur into a rattling haze above his keyboard.
My fingers rest on my terminal’s space bar while my eyes recon the room. A man who looks just like Ponytail works a few terminals away. But his hair is different, more of a crew cut. Wait, there’s another one over there! Now I pick out more twins, triplets, and quadruplets, but some of them are from a different family. They don’t look like Buzz and Ponytail, but they do look like one another. There are some non-twins in here, too, but half
the people I can see are identically related to someone else in this library.
Trick comms, “This is interesting.” I lean over to see what it is. “It’s a residence schedule,” he continues. “Kazim is already here.” Patrick continues to type with blazing speed. His eyes are glued to the screen, and he doesn’t even glance at the keyboard. For someone with only minor Mods and no Enhances at all, he can type like a motherfucker.
He suddenly stops typing and reads the screen with his mouth open. Trick can memorize upward of a zillion words a minute, so something must have caught his eye to halt him in his tracks like this.
“The Germans have finished their second generation of cloning research,” he comms. “They called it Gen-2.”
“What’d they figure out?”
“They figured out how to mass-produce clones.” He reads some more. “Accelerated growth from infancy to adulthood.” More reading. “Oh, no way. This timeline can’t be right.” He hisses, “Jeez-us,” then he comms, “Gen-2 can grow a clone from infancy to adulthood in only two years.”
While he works, I notice that the computer equipment in here doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen before. It’s all smaller than what we have at ExOps, yet something about the design of it exudes incredible processing power. Maybe it’s the giant vent slots on all the cases. They look like fire-breathing dragons. I’ve been told that Carbon is the best-funded government project on earth. The gear I see here reinforces that in my mind. This stuff seems awesome.
“Ah, here it is,” Trick comms. “Gen-3.” He scans the screen. His eyes open wide, and the color drains out of his face. He whispers, “Dear God.”
I’ve never heard my partner say that. “What?” I comm. “What is it?”
“A Gen-2 clone is an adult in body only. Its mind is still the mind of a child.”
That would explain Buzz and Ponytail’s atrocious table manners back at the cafeteria
.
“So, giant kids?”
“Basically, yeah. But Gen-3 aims to fix that by … by …” He stops.
I wait as long as I can, about one second. “How?” I comm.
“Carbon’s Gen-3 is going to try to map the consciousness of an Original into the minds of Gen-2 clones. If that works, Carbon will be able to generate exact duplicates of people in only two years. The duplicates would be twenty-year-olds no matter how old the Original had been.” He turns to me and comms, “They could make copies of some famous person, like Werner Herzog or somebody. If they kept on doing this, he’d never die.”
“What on earth,” I comm, “are these guys smoking?”
“I know, I know. It sounds insane. But so was Gen-2.” He pauses. “If this next step worked … it would change everything about being human.”
A group of half a dozen people walk into the library. They have to hunt around for terminals to use. It’s getting full in here.
I pretend to work on my terminal and comm, “Somebody’s going to notice us if we stay here much longer.”
“Right,” Patrick comms back. He shakes his head a bit to clear his blown mind. “I’ll run that comm trace on Fredericks, and we’ll relocate.” He types like crazy for a minute, then comms, “Damn, I can’t tunnel into our comm-tracing program from here. C’mon, I think I know where we can get better access.” Trick logs out from his terminal, stands up, and walks out of the library. I follow him. He takes a left, deeper into the facility. He’s going somewhere specific. Our purposeful stride helps us fit in, since everybody here seems very Type A.
Trick takes a right into a smaller, coldly lit hallway. We climb a flight of stairs and stop at the last gray door on the right. Trick reaches into his bag for his lock pick,
and I put myself into Manhattan Radar Mode—fully amped hearing and vision—to give myself advance notice if anyone walks up the hall. Footsteps echo from the main hallway, but no one comes into sight. Patrick works on the lock for about a minute and then pops open the door. We slide inside, shut the door, and turn on the lights.
I comm, “Where are we?”
“Kazim’s office.”
“He has an office here?”
“Yeah. He shares it with other visiting investor big shots. I figure the terminal in here will have better outside access.” The office’s primary occupant is a desk on which sit a lamp, a computer terminal, a square cup full of pens, and two telephones. One phone is white, and the other is black. In front of the desk are two visitor’s chairs, and behind the desk is a wall of filing cabinets. There are no windows. Air flows in from a big vent in the wall up near the ceiling. There’s another vent on the opposite wall. I figure one vent is in and the other vent is out so the air can circulate through the subterranean room.
Patrick sits at the desk and uses the computer terminal. After a minute he says, “Ah hah, here we go.” His fingers flash across the keyboard, and then he sits back to wait for a result.
I ask, “Do you think Gen-3 has anything to do with my dad?”
“Hey, you know what?” Patrick hunches over the keyboard again. “It might.” More furious typing, and then he stares at the screen as page after page of data shuttles past.
I tiptoe to the door and listen to the hallway outside. We do
not
want anyone to catch us in here.
Patrick is in his glory. While he makes like a big data sponge, he mutters, mostly to himself, “This might be the most intel we’ve gotten from Germany since the Warsaw Confrontation.”
I look around the room. Nowhere to hide unless you count the vents. Trick and I have crawled through ventilation systems in airports, but not on a mission. None of our previous Job Numbers required nearly the amount of sneakiness we’re attempting now.
Suddenly Trick sits up straight, “Oh!” he exclaims. I wait for him to finish. He reads some more. “Yes! He’s here!” He looks up at me. “Big Bertha is being used as a test Original for Gen-3.” Back to the screen. “Christ, they’re trying to make copies of your father.”
I can’t respond or react. Dozens of questions splash into my mind, but I’m too stunned to ask any of them. Finally, I just point at the computer screen. “Where did you find that?”
Patrick says, “It’s an inventory of the Carbon Program. Big Bertha was transferred to Gen-3 in April, only a few days before you pulled the Hector job.” He looks at a different part of the screen. “Ah, the trace is done.” He types a brief sequence, takes one look at the screen, and lurches back in his chair with his hands on his temples. He stares at me with eyes as wide as saucers.
“It’s him!” He moves his hands over his mouth. “Fredericks is XSUS One! Oh, my God, Scarlet, Jakob Fredericks has been rogue for at least eight years.” Trick counts the puzzle pieces on his fingers. “He’s the one who panicked when he realized that the ExOps agent following Hector was Big Bertha’s daughter. He falsified your father’s last job in CORE—and probably wrote all those out-of-character reports. Those two Protectors
were
his.” Patrick looks at his hands while he puts it all together. “He must have a tap into ExOps, and he’s been passing that info to Kazim Nazari.” He looks at me again. “Shit, he might know we’re in Zurich. We have to get out of here. Right now.”
My swirling thoughts are interrupted by footsteps in the hall. “Oh, fuck! Solomon, somebody’s coming!” Trick logs out of the computer while I jump up to the vents and yank each of the big covers off. After he shuts
down the terminal, Trick throws his bag into the In ventilation shaft and then turns to me.