Continuance (39 page)

Lindsay’s mouth tightened. “Back
in the lab, you said I was ignorant. Maybe you were right. But you also said I
didn’t care about what happened to your friend Gallihugh.” Even in the
darkness, his eyes grew sharp, intense. “Maybe you were wrong.”

Keeping the gun aimed at Jason, Grieves
reached into a pocket and tossed something small to Chaela. She snatched it out
of the air. “An opdisk?” she asked.

He nodded. “The access codes for
your retinal transceivers. Broadcast them on RF at close range to disable them.”

Chaela exchanged an unbelieving
look with Jason, staring at the opdisk like a precious jewel. “Thank you,” she
breathed, her voice barely above a whisper.

Grieves shrugged, finally lowering
the gun. “They require active suppression, so you have to keep the signal
going. If the implants lose the connection, they’ll reactivate.” He holstered
the gun, looking back and forth between them. “Neal’s on his way here. He knows
you found the inhibitor. And he knows Dr. Fairchild was helping you. You
probably want to be gone when he gets here.”

Chaela threw Jason a worried
look. “He knows about Mandy, Jason. We can’t let him take her in.” She pulled
out her AP and held it to her ear as she put a voice call through.

“We’ll go public with the
evidence, then.” Jason said. “Unless he leaves us alone.”

Grieves shook his head. “Neal’s
not the sort to respond well to that kind of deterrence. Hit him with a
backhand and he’ll grab a baseball bat.”

 “She’s not picking up.” Chaela’s
voice held a frantic edge as she looked at Jason.

 “Then we need to find out where
she is,” Jason said.

Grieves held up a finger as he
stared at something in his smartglasses. “The SLIDe network picked up her
bioprint a half hour ago.” He tilted his head toward the Novella building, not
fifty yards away. “She’s downstairs in the lab.”

2087

The orange-grey
glow of twilight spilled through the Angeles Spire’s transparent skin, bathing
the space inside in transient light. The floor buzzed with activity as Jason
and Alex strode along the raised walk, while techs in white lab coats circulated
between the pods of cloning tubes and photonics to either side. Chrysalis had
stepped up production in the weeks since continuing Jason. At full capacity,
this facility would average one a week – respectable, given the twelve-month
cloning period.

“So Kennedy will
hit you with all the high level stuff,” Alex said. “Don’t contact living
relatives or descendants. Assimilate and keep a low profile. Don’t approach any
Chrysalis members or facilities. Yadda yadda.” He reminded Jason of a flight attendant
giving the safety lecture before takeoff. “But what you really want to know is
where you’ll be sleeping tonight.” He handed Jason a transparent keycard.
“We’ve got a room in Newport Beach reserved under Jason Day. Under the
mattress, you’ll find another access card. It links to an account with enough
to last you a few months. There’ll also be an opdisk with the names of some
employers friendly to the recently young.” He gave Jason a lopsided smile. “And
the rest, you’ll pick up along the way.”
“Thanks, old man.” After his conversation with Alex up top, Jason felt better
about the prospect of leaving the facility tonight. More than better.

“Any idea where
you’ll go?” Alex asked.

“Not really.”
Jason shook his head. He pulled the opdisk with Michelle’s genome from his
jacket pocket. “But I’ve got something to start with.”

As they made their
way around the central core, Jason spotted a young man ahead. He leaned against
the railing overlooking one of the pods, just outside the director’s office. Stocky,
with a snug-fitting shirt under a leather jacket, he was one of the few besides
Jason wearing street clothes. Jason had seen him a few times in passing during
his trips to the observation deck.

“Shane, right?”
Jason asked.

“These days,
yeah.” Another transitional like Jason, Shane had been continued at almost the
same time.

In a way Jason
owed his continuance to him. Rumor had it he was unusual because he was one of
the few who’d been allowed interaction with someone from his past – his brother,
who happened to run security here at the facility. Even though the data
Chrysalis had stolen from Arkive were de-identified – genomes and neuromaps with
no names – Shane’s brother had worked with one of the techs to do some creative
analysis. Using the stasis dates of people they’d already continued, he
narrowed Shane’s biorecord to a likely set of a few dozen records, assuming a
correlation of record order in Arkive. Those records had been bumped to the top
of the cloning queue, and they’d hit pay dirt. Jason was one of those nearby
records they’d queued up in an effort to find him.

“Aren’t you
supposed to be out of here?” Alex asked Shane.

He frowned. “There’s
some disagreement about that. Seems not everybody’s convinced.” He inclined his
head toward the closed door. Jason heard muffled voices coming through, quiet
but tense.

Furrows lined Shane’s
forehead, and he seemed to be trying to stare through the door. “I couldn’t
remember our dog’s name – the one we had as kids. Kennedy told him it was
temporary. He said it could take a few more days for the vectoring to settle in
enough to connect all the minor pathways. Thomas isn’t so sure.”

“Your brother?” Jason
asked, unbelieving. Jason had never met Shane’s brother, just knew he was chief
of security for the facility. How could he believe Shane was anything other
than who he had been?

“Maybe he’s the
one with the memory problem,” Alex said.

Shane snorted.
“Not likely. Thomas can be a little eccentric, but he’s sharp.”

“Sharp may have nothing
to do with it. He’s been carrying you around in his head for twenty years – his
idea of you. No matter how sharp he is, it’s probably a little rusty.” Alex
held his palms up as if this were just one of those things a man had to deal
with when coming back from the dead. “Now that you’re here, it might be hard to
live up to expectations. Don’t worry. I’m sure he’ll come around. And if not, Kennedy
will set him straight.” Alex turned to Jason. “I’ve got work to do, kid. Good
luck out there.”

He disappeared
down one of the raised walks, leaving Jason to wait with Shane. They watched as
a tech in a white coat picked up a transparent cylinder filled with amber fluid.
Fitting it into a receptacle port on the nearest cloning tube, he grabbed a
tool with a short rectangular blade the dull color of gunmetal. A wedge had
been cut from the tip to form a v-shaped cutting edge, and he inserted the tool
into a guide slot, effortlessly slicing the end off the cylinder. Jason had
learned those canisters were made of a single piece of diamandoid to contain
the vectoring nanites inside the fluid. To open them, the techs used blades
with an edge made of graphene, sharp as a handful of molecules and able cut
steel like butter.

With a quiet
hiss, a vacuum voided the contents, and the feminine outline of a face
materialized in cloning tube, momentarily translucent. Jason knew Michelle
wasn’t in the stolen Arkive data these people came from – that he wouldn’t have
recognized her even if she were. But he found himself searching the face for
familiar features anyway – the soft line of her chin, the smooth curve of her
brow. Then the fluid diffused into the surrounding solution, and the face
dissolved like an apparition.

“So what’s going
on in there?” Jason nodded toward the closed door of the office.

Shane shook his
head. “Thomas came in while I was signing out with Kennedy. I guess he asked to
delay my release so he could do some more tests. When he found out I was going
to walk tonight anyway, he started to lose it. Kennedy asked me to give them a
minute in private.” She shook his head, looking troubled. “They’ve been in
there for ten.”

The voices
inside were louder now. Jason had no trouble making them out, even through the
closed door.

“…knew him better
than anyone, damn it!”

“Look, I
understand your concern, but you’ve been running security here from the first
continuance.” Jason recognized Director Kennedy’s voice, civil but growing with
impatience. “Long enough to see us bring back dozens of people with no
problems. Long enough to understand there’s nothing to be worried about here.”

“I’ve also been
around long enough to understand we’re excluding things – injuries and orphaned
pathways, networks too faint or fragmented for the vectoring to mirror. It’s
not a verbatim copy. It’s shorthand.” Undoubtedly Thomas, his voice held a
strained control that set Jason on edge.

“It’s efficient.
We bypass extraneous pathways and redundancies while preserving every essential
aspect of memory and self.”

“Maybe we need
those extraneous pathways,” Thomas said. “Maybe they’re part of what makes us
human.”

“No more than being
nearsighted or autistic does.”

“And what about
the other effects? Michael made Ds in math. Now the only thing that keeps him
from calculating pi to ten thousand places is when he has to stop to go to the
bathroom. Is that human? We need to end this. It’s not what we bargained for.”

Anger charged
Kennedy’s voice. “It’s
better
than we bargained for. Michael will be
fine. I’m clearing him for release.”

Thomas’s voice
became strangely calm, barely audible through the door. “Whatever he is, he’s
not Michael. He’s affront to my brother’s memory. And he won’t be leaving.
Nobody will.”

Jason exchanged
an uneasy look with Shane.

“What have you
done?” Kennedy’s was an icy accusation.

“The only thing
I could to honor Michael’s memory.”

Chill fingers of
dread closed around Jason’s insides. Shane stood staring at the door as if not
comprehending what he was hearing. Jason grabbed him by the arm. “We need to
get out of here. Now.”

An alarm split
the air, a shrill digital keen, paralyzing everyone across the floor. Techs and
engineers looked around in disbelief as shouts came from somewhere around the
corner, near the core.

“Lock the
systems out!”

“Where’s
security?”

Jason pulled at
Shane, but he jerked away, yelling as he rushed into the office. “Thomas, no!
It’s me!”

Cursing under
his breath, Jason leapt the railing into a sunken pod area beside a triad of
cloning tubes. Pressing his back against the wall, he forced himself to
stillness as the heavy fall of footsteps sounded above. At their loudest, they
stopped – just above him. From his vantage point in the shadows, he made out the
distorted reflections of several men in the glossy face of a cloning tube.
Their faces were impossible to make out, but several wore dark suits and
glasses. Guns drawn, they moved their heads in a slow rhythm, scanning the
area.
DIA spiders.

“You blind
bastard. It’s me!” Shane screamed, oblivious to the surrounding agents. The sound
of the alarm cut off like a lamb whose neck had been snapped. Across the floor,
Jason saw other spiders fanning out around the facility, chasing down
engineers, techs, transitionals – anyone in their path.

“Good as your
word.” A different voice. One of the spiders. “I’m surprised.”

“Let’s get this
over with,” Thomas said. “Start with this one.”

Impossibly fast,
Shane’s reflection lunged at Thomas, and his hands locked around his brother’s
throat. Jason couldn’t make out their faces clearly in the reflection, but
gurgling noises came from above as Thomas struggled to free himself. Gunshots
rang out, but Shane whirled, somehow anticipating well enough to dodge, even while
he kept his death grip around Thomas’s neck. Still, there were too many for him
to take on alone – a bullet would find him eventually.

Jason took a
breath.
This is my chance.
He scurried to the edge of the pod, then
slipped over the lip onto the walkway – behind the spiders.

Thomas already
lay on the ground, and one of the agents as well. But three still stood, the
one in the back squaring up for a shot at Shane. With a strength and speed he
wouldn’t have believed of himself, Jason leaned to the side, smashing his foot
into the man’s back like a wrecking ball.

In that instant,
any lingering self-image Jason still carried of himself as a middle-aged man
evaporated. Without thought, he
spun
sweeping his leg in a perfect arc,
cutting the legs from beneath the spider beside him, catching him in the back
of the head with an elbow on his way down. Shane had already taken care of the
third, and Jason surveyed the aftermath in awe as all three men lay sprawled in
a heap next to Thomas. The spiders might have gotten off two shots between
them. None had found their mark.

Shane stood
looking down on Thomas’s still form, rage and pain filling his face. His
brother’s head lay turned the other away, but he was still breathing. Jason
could see the dark imprints of finger marks around his neck, already turning dark
blue.

Jason grabbed
one the spiders’ guns, then took Shane by the shoulders. “We have to go!”