Mirrored Man: The Rob Tyler Chronicles Book 1 (27 page)

He was still flipping channels when two
young airmen attached to the security detail wandered into the
room. It wasn't uncommon for a few of the security policemen to
come inside, especially the animal lovers, during their off-duty
hours.

“Good evening, sir,” they said as they went
to the kitchen in search of a snack.

“Evenin' fellas. Catch anything?” Rob asked
cheerfully, grateful for the company.

They stopped and gave him a perplexed look.
“Sir?”

Rob watched their expressions change to
confusion accented with concern. “A joke, gentlemen.” They smiled
tentatively and went about their business.

Rob continued to scan through the channels.
Finding nothing interesting, he settled on one of the late night
talk shows.

The airmen, one with a bowl of chocolate
chip ice cream and the other with an even larger bowl heaped with
freshly popped popcorn, came stiffly to the living area,
unused to the stranger’s company. “Mind if we join you, sir?”

Rob looked at them seriously. “Only if
you’re sharin'.” He smiled to lighten the mood.

As they watched whatever happened to be on,
the airmen relaxed. Having only seen the commander on the security
monitors, they didn’t know what to expect. But they quickly found
him to be down to earth and easy to talk to. They even began to
appreciate his quirky sense of humor.

The subject soon turned to old cars. The
three weren’t surprised to find that they shared this common
interest. Rob told them about Daisy, and how much he enjoyed
working on the Bronco. One of the airmen told the story of how he,
his uncle, and his father had restored a French blue 1972 Triumph
TR6 convertible to showroom quality the summer before he enlisted
in the Air Force. The other had a similar story about a 1949 Ford
Coup that he and his brothers had chopped and made into a low
rider.

Rob glanced at the clock. “Wow. It’s three
o’clock and I’m still not tired.” He rolled his eyes. The prospect
of staying in the place for six more days with nothing to do was
unappealing at best, but to suffer insomnia too? It was too much.
Looking back at the television, he saw an ad for a local car repair
shop. “Hey guys, you like to work on old cars, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

Rob stood to his feet and rubbed his hands
together. “C'mon. I’ve got a project for us.”

* * * * *

DURING THE NEXT FIVE
days Rob had
very little contact with any of the cloning team. They were
diligently monitoring the clone's progress and rarely left the lab.
Jimmy occasionally wandered through the parlor late at night, but
was invariably summoned back to the lab by Don or the professor who
needed this process scanned or that progress monitored. Poor
Jimmy’s work was never done.

As for the others, any combination of five,
except Eddie who seemed to be keeping his distance, could be found
in the parlor during the evenings for an impromptu poker
tournament. As it turned out, Tiong was the shark in that tank. Rob
got his wish to play horse with June several times, and Jimmy had
attempted, when he could find a few spare minutes, to show him how
to play some of the video games in the library.

Rob was mildly concerned with the slight but
persistent shortness of breath he began experiencing. He attributed
it to nerves, even though he hated to admit that he was anxious. At
times, he had to concentrate in order to take a deep satisfying
breath. Don invited him several times to come see the clone’s
development, but he refused. He simply wasn't comfortable with the
idea.

When he woke up on day six, Rob felt
claustrophobic. He longed for wide-open spaces and blue sky. He
daydreamed about swimming in the warm ocean, and made himself a
promise to take Carol and the kids to the beach when he got home.
He was sitting in the parlor reading his Bible when Jimmy’s voice
came over the intercom.

“Good morning, Walmart shoppers. The time is
now eight o’clock a.m. The clone is ninety point four three seven
percent complete. Estimated time of awakening is twelve forty-three
a.m. Monday morning. While you’re here, check out the deli for some
great deals on salami and Black Forest ham. Thank you for shopping
with us.”

“Wow. He is incredibly annoying.” Rob stared
at the speaker in the ceiling. He turned his attention back to his
reading. He had made some real progress during the week and was up
to the book of James, his favorite in the New Testament. Its
chapter one message of persevering through trials was, he felt,
especially poignant for his present situation.

“Morning,” June greeted as she came into the
room, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. She had just woken from a
nap after getting up early to attend to the chimps.

“Mornin',” Rob replied after finishing the
verse he was reading. “I made whomp cinnamon rolls. You're welcome
to ‘em.”

“What the heck are
whomp
cinnamon
rolls?”

“The kind that come in a can. When I was a
kid, you had to
whomp
them on the counter to open them. Now
you have to use a spoon.”

June smiled through her sleepiness.
“Thanks.” She washed her hands and scanned the long countertop,
spotting the rolls on a platter covered with a paper towel. “Having
a problem with flies here inside this
clean
environment, are
we?”

“Haven’t seen Jimmy this morning,” he
replied with a straight face.

She poured herself a glass of milk, selected
one of the icing-topped rolls, and joined Rob in the living area.
She plopped into the loveseat next to him, tucking her feet under
thighs. “What'cha reading?”

“My Bible.”

“No kidding. Which book?”

“James.”

June thought for a moment. “‘Consider it
pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds,
because you know that the testing of your faith develops
perseverance.’”

“‘Perseverance must finish its work so that
you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything,’” Rob
recited, finishing verse four.

“Any special meaning to those verses for
you?” she asked, obviously referencing the process going on a few
rooms away.

“I just happened to be in James,” he
replied. “But, yes, they aptly fit this … situation.”

They spent the rest of the day visiting the
chimps, playing board games, and talking—anything to take Rob’s
mind off of things. While playing basketball, the shortness of
breath began to intensify. He was able to maintain control with
some effort, but June noticed that he was uncomfortable. Late that
evening, they met back in the parlor to watch a movie. Without
warning, Don erupted into the room, nearly taking the door off its
hinges. He had a huge smile plastered on his dark face. It was the
first time that either of them had seen him since Monday. He
scanned the room and found Rob and June standing in the living
area, their alarmed expressions dimming his excitement a bit.
“What's wrong?” June asked.

Don clapped his hands together. “Nothing's
wrong. In fact, everything's perfect.” He trotted towards them. He
started to hurdle the recliner in front of him, but decided against
it, considering his prosthesis. “Today is the big day. Well,
technically it'll be tomorrow, but it's within five hours now.”

Both June and Rob tensed, but for different
reasons.

“You guys have got to come and see! We're
over ninety-five percent, now. He's got hair!”

Rob flinched involuntarily. The detail was
more than he wanted to know.

“We heard Jimmy earlier,” June said, sitting
down. She fixed her eyes on the television as Rob gave Don a
doubtful look.

Don danced around the chair, barely able to
contain his glee. He ended up face-to-face with Rob, his hands on
his shoulders, something that he would never have done if he
weren’t stoked with adrenalin. “You gotta come.”

Rob looked past Don, scanning around for the
remote control. The shortness of breath that had nearly been
forgotten returned as he did.

Don frowned. “Don't you want to see the
fruits of your labor?”

“No.”

“Why don't you take me? I'd like to see.”
June was attempting to get Don's attention off of Rob, more than
anything else. She had been curious about the procedure when they
had cloned the chimps, but she hadn't developed any enthusiasm in
Rob’s case. Once it had been established that Rob was a committed
husband and father, she had spent a good deal of time with him. She
now thought of Rob as the older brother she never had.

Don grabbed June by the hand and dragged her
out of the room.

Slumping back into the chair, Rob considered
his Bible. No matter how much he had read and prayed about his
decision to be a part of what was happening here, he had received
no answer, no insight pointing to right or wrong. He knew that
prayers weren't often answered in a perceptible way. That their
results could go unnoticed until much later, once there was time to
reflect upon them.

At first, it gave him some comfort. Nothing
had ever happened to him, good or bad, that hadn't resulted in his
eventual benefit in some way. But he also realized that life's
storms had a way of sneaking up on people when they were least
prepared. Sitting there, he remembered a conversation he had had
with a priest during the process of his confirmation when he was
thirteen. “In life we must endure many storms,” he recalled,
speaking the priest’s words aloud in the empty room. “If the waters
are smooth today, you must keep watch on the horizon for the dark
clouds, and listen for approaching thunder.”

It had been some time since he endured a
storm.

* * * * *

JUNE GAZED INSIDE
the nursery and
stared at the shadowy form within as music played softly in the
background. Yeoum believed that the clone could hear within the
confines of the chamber, just as a developing fetus hears sounds
through its mother’s flesh. Music was, he believed, a necessary
element in the development of the new life. He had even
begrudgingly agreed to intersperse his classical choices with a
limited selection of Don's own favorites from the 80s and 90s.

Partially hidden by the translucent liquid
was a human form. Its size and shape looked to be the same as
Rob's, but details, other than a pink coloration and the darkness
of the hair on its head, were impossible for June to determine.

“Can you believe it?” Don whispered, holding
his thumb and forefinger a hair’s breadth apart. “We're this
close.”

“Have there been any complications?” June
asked.

“None,” Don grinned.

June stared in morbid fascination at the
ghostlike outline. The realization of her fears was right in front
of her, but she held on to the hope that humans would prove far too
complicated to duplicate, even under the watchful eye of SIS. The
computer had complete control of the process, introducing the
building blocks of protein sequences and other elements at the
precise nanosecond required. No human possessed the skills to come
close to what Jimmy's software could do.

“Great,” June said unenthusiastically.

Don didn’t notice her blasé attitude. “It's
been even smoother than it was with Angelina. It's taken a little
longer, not so much because of the size differential as it is the
complexity of the cerebrum. Your chimps are smart, June, but humans
will always be smarter.”

She was mildly insulted by both the slight
against her babies and the fact that Don thought she wasn't already
aware of the fact. “Present company excepted.”

If Don heard the insult, he ignored it. He
remained intent on the contents of the tank, much as a cheetah
might study a baby gazelle with a pronounced limp. “This must be
close to what God himself sees.”

A chill ran up June’s spine at his words.
She found them to be more than a little disturbing. “Please, don't
talk like that.”

Again, he ignored her. “Can you imagine what
this will mean to medicine? The good it will do?”

June remained silent, unable to forget Rob's
reaction to Don's exuberant conduct an hour before.
Would it
really do the good that Don was prematurely bragging about?
She
leaned in close, her breath fogging a small patch of glass, and
whispered, “Are you going to save the world?”

Earlier that afternoon, Yeoum had stood and
stared at the nursery. Here was the culmination of over sixty years
of work begun by his father, a
daechwa
in the North Korean
Army. Yeoum himself had achieved this same ranking of senior
colonel before defecting to Canada in 1991 at the age of 54.

He had worked with his father at the
military hospital in Pyongyang, beginning as a young boy. Funded by
the administrations of Kim Il-Sung and his son, Kim Jong-Il, the
“Human Enhancement Program” was an extremely high priority endeavor
for the North Korean government, which was eager to field the
world’s largest army. He’d been given unrestricted travel
privileges, surpassing even those of his father, which had allowed
him to attend foreign seminars and conferences that he deemed
necessary to further his work. It was in Montreal, where he had
made subtle inquiries on previous trips, that he had left his
delegation and had sought political asylum.

He had been given permanent residency, but
was afraid for his life. So he reluctantly accepted an offer of
employment from the United States in exchange for his continued
work in the field of cloning. It was eventually an arrangement he
came to enjoy. With the resources made available to him, he was
able to make steady advancements and add team members essential to
his success.

He had been conditioned from an early age to
ignore the test subjects of his experiments in North Korea,
regardless of species. There was no possible way for him to
remember how many had been sacrificed over the decades in pursuit
of the elusive quest of cloning. The faces had long since faded
from memory. Until more recently, that is. Agonizing screams from
the past had begun to make their way back into the professor’s
conscience as the present project developed. Through the increased
use of alcohol, Yeoum had managed to squelch them temporarily. But
even that had been losing its effectiveness of late.