Blackout

Nine

Gregory motioned for silence as we left my room. I nodded, for once grateful for my lack of shoes. My socks didn’t squeak against the tile. Somehow, he managed to walk so that his shoes didn’t make any noise, and we passed through the darkened CDC building like ghosts.

The door at the end of the hall was open, the light above it glowing a steady amber. Alarm lanced through me. Green lights mean there’s no danger; red lights mean the danger is near. Amber lights mean something has gone wrong.

Gregory’s hand landed on my shoulder, stopping me before I could do more than stiffen. “It’s part of our window,” he said, keeping his voice low. “Come on. We’re almost there.”

“Where are we going?” I asked, taking his words as license to break my own silence. He led me through the door and into another hall, one I’d seen only in passing, when they were taking me from one lab to another.

“Someplace they’d rather you didn’t see,” he said. He didn’t need to tell me who “they” were. “They” were the people who’d brought me back from the dead, and who gave Dr. Thomas his marching orders. “They” were the people behind all of this.

“So it’s something that’s going to cause me some of that stress they’re so interested in minimizing,” I guessed, more for the comfort of speaking than out of any serious desire to have my thoughts validated.

“You could say that,” Gregory said. We reached a corner. He raised a hand, signaling me to stop, and stepped around it alone. “We’re clear. Come on.”

I came.

We walked to another door with an amber light above it. This one led to a hall I hadn’t seen before. It was less pristine than the others. There were whiteboards on the walls, scribbled with notes about cafeteria menus and security sweeps. There were even a few flyers taped up, advertising cars for sale or asking if anyone knew a good tutoring service for high school biochemistry. It looked so much more real than the place I’d been since I woke up, so much more human, that it almost made my chest hurt. The world still existed. I’d died and come back, and the whole time I was gone, the world continued.

Gregory started walking faster, saying, “We’re almost there. We allowed six minutes transit each way, which gives us fifteen minutes at our destination. I’m going to need you calm at the end of that time. I can’t drag you down these halls if you’re not working with me.”

“Meaning what?” I asked, trying to sound like my stomach wasn’t balling itself into a small, hard knot of fear.

“Meaning that if you lose it, I’ll leave you.” The words were kindly spoken—he wasn’t trying to be cruel, just stating a fact. If I couldn’t control myself, he’d leave me. The other half of that statement didn’t need to be spoken: The EIS couldn’t afford to have his cover blown because I couldn’t keep myself calm. If he left me, he probably wouldn’t be leaving me alive.

“I understand.”

“Good,” he said. He stopped at a door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, producing a thumb drive from his pocket. He plugged it into the side of the blood testing unit. The unit beeped twice, and the light above the door went out. Gregory put his hand on the doorknob, but didn’t turn it. Instead, he looked at me gravely and asked, “Are you ready?”

“No,” I said. “I’m pretty sure I’ve never been ready for anything that had to be prefaced with that question. Now open the door.”

A small smile crossed his lips. “That’s the answer I wanted to hear,” he said, and opened the door, revealing a darkened lab. A dim blue glow filled the back third of the room. I looked back at Gregory, raising my eyebrows. “It’s okay,” he said. “Go on.”

“There’s an invitation to die for,” I said, and stepped across the threshold. The overhead lights clicked on immediately, starting low and climbing to a normal level of illumination. I appreciated that small courtesy. I may not be as photosensitive as I used to be, but that doesn’t mean I enjoy being blinded.

Gregory stepped in behind me, closing the door. “Here we are,” he said.

“Where is ‘here,’ exactly?” I asked, squinting as I looked around the room. It looked like it had been cast on the same mold as all the other CDC labs I’d visited, with undecorated walls, stain-proof linoleum floors, and lots of equipment I didn’t recognize. My heart leapt a little at the one thing I did recognize: a computer terminal.

Gregory followed my gaze and grimaced, looking genuinely sorry as he said, “I can’t let you get on the Internet from here, Georgia. It’s not safe.”

“But—”

“That’s not why we’re here.” He nodded toward the back of the room. The blue glow was less evident now that the lights were on, but it was still there.

“Right,” I muttered, and turned to look in that direction. From where I was, it looked like a fish tank filled with luminescent blue liquid. I frowned and started toward it, trying to figure out what it was, and why it was important enough for Gregory to risk both our lives by bringing me here.

I think, on some level, that I knew what it was even before I saw it; I just had to put off understanding for as long as possible if I wanted to be able to handle what I was about to see. But maybe that’s hindsight, me trying to justify things to myself. I don’t really know. What I do know is this:

The blue liquid wasn’t fully opaque; it just looked that way from a distance. It cleared as I approached, and by the time I reached the tank, I could see the outline of a human figure through the blue. I squinted, but couldn’t make out any real details beyond the fact that it was female, and surrounded by a forest of tangled cords.

Gregory stepped up behind me and leaned to my left, pressing a button at the top of a control panel I hadn’t noticed until then. The glow brightened, and the liquid began turning transparent, small lines of bubbles marking the spots where filters were cleansing some element out of the mix. In only a few seconds, I could see the figure floating in the tank.

She was naked, in her mid-twenties, and curled in a loose fetal position, like she had never needed to support her own limbs or head. Her hair was dark brown and badly needed to be cut. It was long enough that the movement of the liquid around her made it eddy slowly, wrapping around her neck and arms. Sensors were connected to her arms and legs, running up to join with the main cable. Her mouth and nose were exposed—she was breathing the liquid; I could see her chest rise and fall—and a thicker tube was connected at her belly button, presumably providing her with oxygen and nutrients. I stared at her, watching the way her fingers twitched and her eyes moved behind the thin shields of her eyelids.

Gregory waited, watching me watch her. The room seemed to be holding its breath, both of us waiting to see what I would do, whether I would be able to look at what was in front of me without snapping. For a moment, I didn’t know the answer.

The moment passed. I took a shaky breath, followed it with another, and asked, “How many of us are there?”

“At the moment, three.” Gregory turned his attention to the tank where another Georgia Mason floated. Her hair had never been bleached, and was still the dark brown that mine was supposed to be. I felt a brief flare of jealousy. She looked more like me than I did. “This is subject number 8c. It’s the last member of the subject group following yours.”

“Wait—subject group?” I turned my back on the tank, unsure of my ability to keep my cool while I watched my own silent doppelganger floating in the blue. “What does that mean?”

“Your designation is ‘subject 7c.’ Subject 7a didn’t mature properly; 7b went into spontaneous amplification during the revivification process.” He gestured at the tank. “Subject 8a was shut down due to issues with spinal maturation at about this stage.”

“And 8b?” He wasn’t using names for any of the other subjects, I noticed—he wasn’t even giving them genders. They were just things to him, at least until the moment they woke up and turned into people. That was actually reassuring, because he treated me like a person. I wasn’t the same as them.

I wasn’t.

“Subject 8b is part of why we’re here. Subject 8c is just the backup, in case something goes wrong.” Gregory looked at me carefully. “Are you ready to proceed?”

“You mean, do I want to scream and throw things and maybe vomit, but can I keep myself together a little longer? Yes, and yes.” I shook my head, taking comfort in the fact that I could feel the air against my ears. I might have started out like that girl in the tank, but I wasn’t her anymore. I was awake, and alive, and my hair had been cut. We have to take our comforts where we can find them.

“All right,” said Gregory. “Follow me.”

He led me to a large metal rectangle on the far wall. He tapped a button on a control panel next to it, and stepped back as a whirring sound began to emanate from the wall itself. The metal rectangle slid slowly upward, revealing the room on the other side of the thick, industrial-grade glass. He tapped the control panel again, and the lights came on.

The walls of the room were featureless and white. The only thing that even resembled furniture was a narrow hospital bed with white sheets, surrounded by IV drips and beeping monitors. Thick black straps secured the room’s single occupant to her bed, holding her in place. Unlike the girl in the tank—unlike me, when I first woke up—her hair was cut short, in a precise replica of the haircut I’d worn since I was twelve. I touched the close-shorn hair at the back of my neck without realizing I was going to do it, feeling how uneven the strands were. Dr. Shaw had done her best, but she was no hairdresser.

“This is 8b?” I asked. My voice was weaker than I wanted it to be. I swallowed hard, trying to clear away the dryness that was growing there. “What are they doing with her?”

“They’re stabilizing her.” Gregory touched another button. A video projection appeared on one side of the window, obscuring that half of the room. It showed subject 8b being removed from her tank and shifted onto a gurney. Her hair was long in the recording, and it stuck to her face and shoulders like seaweed. “This was taken a week ago.”

“A week—but that was after they knew that I wasn’t going to amplify. They knew I was viable.” Panic tried to rise inside me like a small, biting animal. I forced it down again as hard as I could, breathing in and out through my nose several times before I asked, “Why are they stabilizing her? What are they planning to do with her?”

Gregory touched another button. The recording skipped, the image of the extraction being replaced by an image of the clone, now clean, clothed, and dry, with her head held up by a wedge-shaped foam pillow. Voices were speaking softly, just offscreen. I almost jumped when Dr. Thomas said, in a loud, clear tone, “Georgia, open your eyes.”

And the recording of subject 8b opened her eyes.

A squeaky moaning sound escaped my lips before I could hold it in. Gregory put a hand on my shoulder, but he didn’t say anything. There was nothing for him to say.

Her eyes were black, her pupils so enlarged that there was no band of color between them and the surrounding sclera. Shark’s eyes, zombie eyes… or the eyes of a person with retinal Kellis-Amberlee, the reservoir condition I’d lived with for most of my life. With those eyes, she looked more like me than I ever could. Someone who was shown a picture of me would probably allow that I looked a lot like a reporter who died during the Ryman campaign. Someone who was shown a picture of her…

“How?” I managed to rasp.

“Surgical alteration,” said Gregory. He took his hand off my shoulder. “They couldn’t induce a specific reservoir condition—when they tried, it either caused immediate amplification, or it triggered a reservoir condition in a different part of the body. Getting one with stable retinal Kellis-Amberlee in both eyes could have taken years.”

I didn’t say anything.

“They’ve had to do more procedures than originally planned. It turns out we don’t really understand the changes retinal Kellis-Amberlee makes to the structure of the eye as well as we thought we did. As soon as they removed the irises, the retinas began to detach. They’ve been replaced with artificial lenses, and the eyes have been stabilized.”

And since I was known to have retinal Kellis-Amberlee, no one would raise any red flags over anomalies in her retinal scans, and the surgical tampering would never be caught. “Slick,” I said. My voice sounded flat, like all the emotion had been somehow pressed out of it. That was a reasonably accurate assessment of how I was feeling. I swallowed again, and asked, “How much time do I have?”

Gregory shot me a sharp look. “What do you mean?”

“They didn’t fix my eyes. They wouldn’t have fixed… her… eyes if they didn’t expect people to see her. Logically, that means they didn’t expect people to see me. If I was the finished product, they would have stopped once I was stable.” My voice was starting to rise at the end of my sentences. I forced it back down, and repeated, “How much time do I have?”

“We think it’ll take about two weeks for them to finish all the tests they have scheduled, and for them to get subject 8b all the way functional. Again, they expected everything to be ready sooner, but they don’t want any lingering pain from the operations to distract from the recovery process.”

I wouldn’t have paid any special attention to my eyes hurting when I woke up. I’d been too busy freaking out over not being dead. I decided to let that go for the moment. “After that?”

“Another two weeks, to be sure the subject won’t spontaneously amplify or suffer organ failure.”

So that had been a genuine risk, not just another way to scare me. Funny thing; even knowing that, I was still scared plenty. “What’s going to happen to me?”

“They’re going to keep you as long as you stay useful, and then…” Gregory’s voice trailed off. “I’m sorry.”

I sighed. “Right. That was a bad question. Why are they doing this? Why waste all this time with me if they’re just going to bring her out of her chemical coma and drop me down the incinerator chute? What are they gaining from keeping me around?”

“You’re the display model. Why do you think Dr. Thomas was so upset when you went and got your hair cut? They want you to be as pretty as possible, to show the investors that this process is safe and painless and yields the best possible results.” Gregory touched the control panel. The image of subject 8b’s eyes vanished, replaced by a four-way split-screen of me being… me. Me, sitting on the bed, one leg tucked under my body, the other rhythmically kicking the mattress. Me, pacing around the edges of the room, my fingers snarled in the short hair above my ears. Me, eating. Me, walking down the hall. The views flickered from perspective to perspective, making it clear both that I had been recorded from multiple angles, and that someone had taken the time to edit it all together into a single continuous feed.

“What?” I asked, staring at the screen. My face stared back at me from a dozen different angles, and every angle showed the eyes that didn’t look as much like my own as the eyes on the clone intended to replace me.

“Everyone knows who Georgia Mason is. The girl who broadcast her own death and turned the tide of a political election. The one who told us to rise. You were the perfect candidate to prove that a person—a real, recognizable person—can return from the grave as themselves, rather than as a pretty, mindless toy.” Gregory glanced at me as he spoke. “They made you as accurate as possible, so that you could be the showroom model. You didn’t think the CDC bankrolled you on their own, did you?”

“I didn’t really think about it,” I said. “So what’s… the other one… supposed to be?”

“The street model. They spent a lot of money getting you right, and while you have a certain ‘unwitting celebrity spokesperson’ cachet, there’s no reason to waste good research. Building an accurate Georgia Mason taught them how to make an inaccurate one.”

For a moment, I just froze. It was like everything in me shut down, my brain refusing to cope with the enormity of what it was being asked to process. Then, slowly, I took a breath, nodded, and said, “How inaccurate are we talking? If I’m Georgia Mason, who’s she?”

“Not quite Georgia Mason.” He tapped the control panel again. There was a single muted beep before the servos engaged, followed by the deeply comforting whir of the metal shutter descending. I wouldn’t have to look at her anymore. Thank God.

“But I’m not quite Georgia Mason either, am I?” I looked up at him. “I can’t be. I’m willing to believe that the CDC can clone people. Hell, I’ve known for years that the CDC could clone people. But there was no convenient backup of my—of her—memories. So who am I?”

“You’re Georgia Mason.” Gregory stepped away from the wall, moving back into my field of view. “The point of all this was proving that the CDC can conquer death. I don’t understand all the science. My field is virology and corporate espionage, not human cloning and memory transfer. But I’ve seen your charts, and while you’re not a perfect replica of yourself, you have a ninety-seven percent accuracy rating. You’re as close as science can get to bringing a person back from the dead.”

“But how?”

“Neural snapshotting.”

I had to allow that it made sense, as much as I understood it, which wasn’t all that well. Thought, memory, everything that makes a person who they are, it’s all electricity, little sparks and flashes encoded in the gray matter of our minds. The Kellis-Amberlee virus takes us over, but it also preserves the brain long after the point of what should be death. It turns those electrical impulses back on, over and over again. If the CDC had a way of taking a picture of those electrical patterns, and then somehow imprinting them on a blank mind… it could work.

I shook my head, frowning at Gregory. “How can you be so calm?”

“How can you?” he shot back. “You’re not the first Georgia I’ve brought here, although you’re the most accurate. The highest transfer score before yours was seventy-five. She started screaming as soon as she saw the clone, and she didn’t stop. You’re the only one who hasn’t cried.”

“I’ll cry later, I promise,” I said, and I meant it. This was the sort of thing that needed to be processed before I could really let myself get upset. “How close is she? If I’m the ninety-seven percent girl, what’s she?”

“Subject 8b has been prepared through a modified conditioning process, which should, if fully successful, result in a forty-four percent accuracy rating when compared to the original, but with some behavioral adjustments,” said Gregory. “She’ll look like you. She’ll act like you…”

“She won’t be me,” I finished. “So what’s she for?”

For the first time since we’d arrived in the lab, Gregory looked at me like I’d said something wrong. “You mean you don’t know?” he asked.

“No. How would I—” I stopped mid-sentence, a sudden horrible certainty flooding over me. “They wouldn’t.”

“Wouldn’t what?”

Somehow, the one word I needed to say was harder to force out than all the others had been. “Shaun?”

Gregory nodded. “That’s the plan. You’ll stay here as long as you’re useful, and she’ll be put where he can find her. Mr. Mason is not particularly stable these days, and they’re reasonably sure he’ll believe whatever he’s told if he thinks it’s going to get you back. He’s not going to ask questions. He’s not going to look for double-crosses. He’s just going to open the doors and let her in.”

My lips thinned into a hard line. Maybe I wasn’t really who I thought I was. Maybe I wasn’t really anyone at all—if I wasn’t Georgia Mason, but I shared her DNA and ninety-seven percent of her personality profile, who else could I be? The one thing I was absolutely sure of was that none of that mattered, because these bastards were not going to use my genetic code to honey-trap the only human being in this world that I had ever been willing to die for.

“Then that’s just not going to happen,” I said. “What do we need to do?”

Gregory glanced at his watch. “Right now, we need to get you back to your room before our window closes. I should be able to get another message to you tomorrow night. You need to keep your eyes open. Keep behaving normally. They’re not going to take you off display unless you do something that makes it look like you’re beginning to destabilize.”

“By ‘take me off display,’ you mean kill me, right?”

He nodded.

“Got it,” I said. “And after that?”

“After that?” said Gregory. He smiled a little, clearly trying to look encouraging. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that all he was really managing to do was look scared. “I think it’s about time that we got you out of here, don’t you?”

“My thoughts exactly,” I said. “Let’s go.”