“Two Y chromosomes? And the Y is what separates men from women. Does that make him more . . .” I almost said “manly.” “Would that make him strong?” Even as I asked the question, a more pressing concern came to mind—
Could we configure the posts to read chromosomes instead of DNA?
“It could make him much stronger than other clones. The potential exists. Lewis was like any other clone on the surface, but his muscles could have been stronger, his heart was stronger . . .”
“What about his brain?” I asked. “What would that do to his brain?”
“Oh, yes, his brain. You know, the autopsy would have been a lot more productive if you hadn’t shot the subject in the head.”
“I didn’t shoot him,” I said.
“Okay, well, whoever shot him really specked up the works,” Sam said, holding both hands up in frustration. “The bullet blew more than half of his brain out of his skull, and the part that was left was in bad shape.”
He walked over to Lewis and placed his fingers around the bone-and-muscle remains of his chin. “It wasn’t a complete washout.”
He turned the head so the empty brain cavity faced toward me. “It’s not conclusive; but considering the amount of trauma done to this man, we’re lucky we found anything.”
“Found what?” I asked.
“I took a tissue scraping from the area just inside here.” The kid stuck his hand into the gaping brainpan and pointed to the part of the forehead that had not been destroyed by the bullet. During my time as a Marine, I had shot, stabbed, strangled, and exploded enemies, but I never played with their remains. I did not peel away their skins or pull out their organs. Watching Sam the cocky student coroner twist and turn the body made me queasy.
“We got this from his brain,” he said, using tweezers to hold up a gauss-thin strip of meat. “Its NAAs are so low, they’re almost not there.”
I asked the obvious question, “What is NAA?”
“N-acetylaspartatic acid.”
“That doesn’t tell me anything,” I said.
The kid was many things, but he was not a snob. When he continued, he did not speak in a condescending way. “It’s a compound you find in a normally functioning brain. Things go wrong when it’s not there. The lower the NAA level, the bigger the problems, and this guy’s levels were really low.”
This information was interesting but not practical. I asked a practical question, “Is there any way we can configure our security equipment to track this?”
He smiled, nodded, and said, “Dead men don’t walk, blind men don’t see . . .”
It was a limerick or maybe a line from an old song. The second half went, “I gave her my heart, and she crucified me.”
“General,” he said, “I checked your chromosomes when you came through the door. A coroner can’t be too careful.”
Before leaving the morgue, I asked the kid to write up his findings and send them to Station Security along with recommendations about how the posts could be upgraded to scan chromosomes instead of DNA.
I returned to my quarters and stripped and showered and ran a laser across my teeth, then went to bed, all the while asking the same questions I had been asking before seeing the coroner—Why would one clone fight to the death and another surrender?
Part of the answer was obvious, self-determination. Clones start out alike, but that does not mean they stay that way. I grew up among clones. I knew brave ones and not-so-brave clones, but I never met a clone who was an outright coward. I went to boot camp with men who would not flinch in the face of death and clones who might hesitate before a charge but none who would run from the field.
But the clones I knew had been raised from infancy. These new clones had to have “crawled out of the tube” in their twenties. The Unified Authority did not have time to raise their clones, they needed them out and killing.
As I slid onto my rack, I thought about bowls and syringes and manufactured chromosomes. Sleep did not come so easily that night because along with the bowl and the syringe came images of the cadaver. I’d seen worse. I’d seen rotted, maggot-infested bodies of men. I once stepped on the body of a man killed by Noxium gas. My boot crushed through his chest. It was like stepping on overripe fruit.
It wasn’t the cadaver that bothered me; it was the casual way the damn apprentice coroner handled it that got under my skin. Lewis was a maniac and assassin, but he was still as human as me.
As I played the scene over in my mind, thoughts gave way to fitful sleep, and I dreamed of men fighting a war in which they killed each other with glass bullets. The men who died were buried in glass coffins in a cemetery with glass headstones. Watching them lower the coffins, I wondered if the men who lived and the men who died were made from the same kind of sand.
I could not tell if it came the minute I fell asleep or six hours later. I woke up disoriented, groped for the communications console beside my bed, and croaked the word, “What?”
The voice on the other end belonged to a woman. “General Harris, this is Jennifer Morman.”
“Morman?” I asked. I did not recognize the name or the voice.
“I’m the forensic psychologist you brought in from Morrowtown.”
I recognized each of the words as she spoke them, but it took a moment before I pieced them together into a coherent stream. Sitting up, I said, “Right . . . right. Have you had a look at the clone I brought in?”
“I’ve never seen anything quite like him,” she said.
I glanced at the clock in the console. The time was 05:28. It no longer mattered whether it was 01:00 or 10:00; it was time for me to get moving. “Have you made any progress?” I asked as I climbed out of bed and slipped into my uniform. I still had sixty minutes before I had planned to wake up.
“Oh, I’ve made progress all right,” she said. “I’ve made a lot of progress.”
I told Morman I would be right over and headed out of my billet. Gobi Station did not have a “forensic psychology” lab, so I’d stuck her in an unused office in the station’s lowest basement. Five armed guards stood outside the lab . . . just in case.
The guards knew me by sight. They stood at attention and let me through. Morman, on the other hand, had never seen me. She heard the door open, turned to say hello, and froze. A strange smile formed across her lips as she said, “Oh my Lord, you’re a Liberator.”
Feeling a bit awkward, I said, “Dr. Morman, I’m General Harris.”
“You are a Liberator, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am a Liberator clone. Is that going to be a problem?” Even the most open-minded people were afraid of Liberators. We were the pit bulls of the synthetic crowd.
“God, no,” she said. “It’s exciting to meet you. I thought the Liberators were extinct.”
“As far as I know, I’m the last,” I said, no longer caring whether or not she felt comfortable around me. She made me uncomfortable. I got the feeling she was dissecting me with her eyes.
“General, for a forensic psychologist like me, you are a gold mine. I’d love to sit down with you and maybe pick your brain.”
Images of Sam the coroner manhandling Sergeant Lewis still played in my head. I did not want this woman giving me the psychological equivalent of an autopsy. “We’ll see,” I said, making a mental note not to spend any unnecessary time down here.
As if she had read my thoughts, Dr. Morman nodded and became somewhat guarded. “Maybe we should stick to Sua,” she said.
“What can you tell me about him?” I asked.
“Oh well, he’s an interesting study,” she said in an all-business tone. “I don’t believe his name is Sua.”
“It’s not. We found the real Philip Sua shortly after we arrested this man. Your patient had stuffed him into a meat locker.”
“Was he all right?” Morman asked.
I pulled a Freeman and answered the question by ignoring it.
“Have you looked at Myron’s report?” she asked.
Maybe I was still tired. It took me a moment to figure out that
Myron
must have been the older coroner.
Myron and Sam,
I told myself. “I’ve spoken with his assistant,” I said.
“Okay, well, did he tell you about the low brain activity?” she asked. “I would have come to the same conclusion without Myron’s help. I mean, you don’t need to spend more than a minute with Sua to see what’s wrong with him, but the autopsy confirmed my findings. Philip Sua’s problems wouldn’t be any more obvious if he had three heads.”
Or if he was a Liberator clone,
I thought as I asked, “And what exactly is his problem?”
“What are his problems? Sua’s problems are legion, General. This man has more devils in him than anyone could ever hope to exorcise.”
“I don’t understand. Are you saying he’s insane?” I thought about the bastard standing for hours in that cargo hold, hitting himself with his tablet and berating himself.
A lunatic?
It made sense.
Maybe a sociopath, too.
His kind killed easily enough. Maybe the Unified Authority had developed a strain of mass-murderer clones. “Is he psychotic?”
“Psychotic,” she said, the word lingering on her lips. She was an older woman, maybe in her forties, the first traces of gray showing in her hair. She wore glasses. She was trim and energetic, and she approached her work with this queer enthusiasm. I might have described her as a playful authority. Maybe she found irony in the notion of a Liberator clone accusing anyone else of being psychotic.
“Clinically speaking, he is not psychotic. He hasn’t lost contact with reality,” she said. “Sua’s problems are more along the lines of neurosis than psychosis. I mean, he does have an induced physical condition, but his behavior is clearly neurotic.”
She must have thought I knew more about forensic psychology than I did. I knew a few psychological terms, but Marines used those terms as pseudoobscenities not diagnosis. When an officer goes out of control, we may report him as a “loose cannon,” but in private conversation we’d refer to him as a “psychotic bastard.”
“What do you mean by neurotic?” I asked.
In answer, she winked, and said, “Let’s go have a word with Mr. Sua, shall we?” She led me through the door at the back of the office into the area that had become her makeshift lab. The only furniture in her lab was a desk, a few stools, and three long-necked floor lamps bunched close together like a trio of storks.
In the center of the room, Philip Sua lay on the contraption that law-enforcement professionals referred to as an “incapacitation cage.” The cage did not rely on anything as primitive as bars or straps or clamps. If Sua managed to sit up, he could have walked right out of the laboratory. The problem was, his muscles weren’t listening to his brain.
He lay on a table with two diodes a pin’s breadth away from the nape of his neck. Metal filaments inserted into the base of his skull channeled the steady stream of electricity running between those diodes through his spine, rendering his body helpless from the neck down. He could not turn his head or uncurl his fingers.
Sua lay conscious on the table, watching us as we entered the room. His eyes switched back and forth between us; but he did not speak. If I expected a psychotic madman with a confident grin and dangerous eyes, that was not what I found. Sua looked nervous.
“Can he speak?” I asked.
“Oh yes, see, hear, speak . . . everything but move. He’s been very cooperative,” Morman said.
I stepped closer to the cage. I did not hear the crackle of electricity or feel a tingle on my skin. The current running through Sua’s body was a mere trickle. “Hello, Sua,” I said.
Dr. Morman introduced me as well. “Philip, this is General Harris.”
“We’ve met,” he said, his brown eyes on my face but never quite meeting my gaze.
I was glad to see two MPs standing in the far corner of the lab with guns on their belts. Despite her ghoulish fascination with Liberators, I liked Dr. Morman. She struck me as smart and competent, but also as a delicate woman playing with forces far more dangerous than she understood.
That thought reminded me of the question that had been nagging me since we arrested Sua. Still watching the captive clone, I said, “Doctor, I’ve run into two of these clones so far. There is the tissue donor down at the morgue, then there is Sua.
“The one in the morgue wouldn’t give up. He was coughing up blood, and we still had to shoot him.
“Then there is Sua. He gave up without a fight.”
Morman had her answer ready. What she said made me forget all about sand, syringes, and bowls. Her answers were far more enlightening. Once she explained herself, everything fell into place.
I asked her if she would be willing to present this information to the admirals during the afternoon session, and she said that would be fine. With the pieces of the puzzle she had given me, I finally understood the infiltrators. What the coroners found was good. What she uncovered was gold.
“They built his brain with a slight abnormality,” Dr. Morman told me. She sat on her rolling stool, I stood. We were still in the lab, close enough for Sua to overhear our conversation.
“You said that Myron and Sam told you about the slowed activity level in the dead clone’s frontal lobe.”
I nodded.
“It’s a symptom of BPD, Borderline Personality Disorder. It’s not uncommon . . . well, not among clones, it’s not. Mr. Sua is something of an extreme case.”
I got as far as, “I don’t understand. What is Borderline Personality—” but she interrupted me.
“Borderline Personality Disorder. It’s a neurophysiological condition that interferes with the patient’s ability to regulate emotion. It affects the way they interpret social questions. If someone told you or me that we had lint on our clothing or a smudge on our face, we’d go clean up and not give it a second thought. It’s a normal interaction, something you fix and forget.
“Someone like Mr. Sua would take it as a personal affront.”