The first tech complained, “Damnit, get the hell out of my lab. All of you.”

“You’d better give us a few hours, Zeta. I haven’t been in the real world for a year and a half.”

“It’s not up to me.”

A ragged older man’s gruff voice boomed out. “Get the hell out of here, you three!”

The two most recent arrivals ducked out without a word. The last one remained, eyeballing someone, who soon walked into Grady’s view. It was the eldest Morrison. The one from Hedrick’s office.

The younger Morrison glared. “I’m not afraid of you, old man.”

The elder Morrison got right in his face. “That can be rectified.”

“A man your age should be careful.”

Morrison smirked. “That’s funny.” He suddenly head-butted the younger man. The young soldier collapsed, and in moments Morrison had his boot on the man’s neck. “Because it’s you who should be careful.”

“Get off me!”

Morrison called out, “Boys! Get this idiot out of here before I kill him.”

Two other clones hurried in and grabbed their compatriot.

Morrison glowered at them. “All of you stay on the transport. You won’t be here long.”

“Yes, sir.”

Morrison’s aged, scarred face followed the men as they carried their injured comrade out. He finally looked down on Grady. “Kids.”

Grady was at a loss for words.

“Don’t give me that look. Mother Nature’s always had clones, Mr. Grady. They’re called twins.” He shook his head ruefully. “I’ve just got way more of ’em than most people.” Morrison turned to the clone in a lab coat. “Zeta, how much longer?”

“About five, ten minutes. Depends on his protein folds.”

Morrison nodded absently, observing the complex imagery on a nearby screen. “I never could get used to all this high-tech crap.” He looked down at Grady again. “But it’s like they say: Anything before you’re thirty-five is new and exciting, and anything after that is proof the world’s going to hell.”

Grady was still trying to get his helplessness-induced panic under control. His breathing was labored.

Morrison scowled at him. “You need to relax, Mr. Grady, or that collar’s going to have difficulty controlling your respiratory functions. We have all the genetic information necessary to make a copy of you, but as you might have noticed, that’s not the same thing as having you.”

The lab technician halted his work and looked up at the ceiling. “Would you stop with this already?”

“I’m talking to this man, here. Do you see me talking to you? Was I talking to you?”

“I think you were talking to me in a way, yes.”

“Just get him prepped. The sooner we get these substandard Neanderthals out of here, the better.”

“I copy that.” The younger man sighed and turned back to his work.

Morrison glowered down at Grady again. Morrison looked old and tired as he rubbed his calloused, thick fingers against his closed eyes.

Grady felt the words forming as a means to keep his mind off the vertigo he was feeling. “Why are you doing this?”

Morrison looked up. “Doing what?”

“Taking away my life.”

“If the director says you need a time-out, then you need a time-out. Hibernity does a great job of changing people’s minds. Literally.”

Grady searched the man’s eyes for some human kindness. He saw none. “This is wrong.”

“Wrong. Right. They’re a matter of perspective. I’m sure gazelles think lions are wrong.”

“And you and your clones are the lions.”

“I’d say they’re more like hyenas.”

The lab technician slammed his computer tablet onto the counter. “Dad, give it a rest already.”

“What? I can’t talk to this poor unfortunate without getting comments from the peanut gallery?”

“I’m not gonna just stand here and listen to you talk shit.”

Morrison turned back to Grady. “You know why they cloned me back in the ’80s, Mr. Grady? Because I was the best special operator the U.S. military ever produced. High intelligence, top physical characteristics—the most determined to survive and overcome. To win. But as it turns out, genetics isn’t destiny—it’s statistics. After two decades it has become quite clear that something about us is not genetic.”

The younger clone interjected, “You don’t even understand the science: The seat of consciousness—what’s known as ‘sensorium’—exists partly as an expression of particle entanglement in higher physical dimensions. The human brain is merely a conduit.”

Morrison gestured toward his younger self. “My point exactly. That’s why none of you will ever be me.” He turned back to Grady. “Turns out you can’t copy people. Just flesh. Now it’s all biotech design. Like Granny Alexa up there.”

The lab technician glared. “Tau said you wanted us all liquidated.”

“Not all of you. Just the less-than-faithful reproductions.”

The lab technician still glared.

Morrison threw up his hands. “What do you want me to say?”

The clone stared hard at Morrison for several moments. “There are times when I feel like murdering you, sir.”

“Well, give it your best shot, son. Just don’t fail.”

They faced each other in tense silence.

Morrison finally grinned. “We share a predilection for homicide. Some of us are just better on the follow-through.”

The lab technician took a deep, calming breath. “I refuse to give in to my genetic predilections.”

“I rest my case.”

The technician turned away in disdain.

“Relax, Zeta. You’re one of the good ones.”

The lab tech looked up. “I’m finished. His file’s done. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

“Good.” Morrison took one last irritated look at the lab clone. “Nox him first, and get him onto transport.”

“Goddamnit . . .”

Grady searched for the words to convince them. “Wait. Don’t do this. I—”

But the irresistible urge to sleep swept over him like a suffocating blanket.

SIX MONTHS LATER

CHAPTER 6

Exile

Jon Grady gazed from the edge of a thousand-foot cliff, across an endless expanse of deep water. He guessed the plunge continued straight down beneath the waves to crushing depths. Such cliffs ringed the island. An island so distant from everywhere that there were only two species of local bird—one flightless—and almost no wildlife. No rodents. No snakes. Limited plants even. Perhaps one day a migratory bird population would arrive. That might give him some indication of where he was.

At nights Grady stood in the darkness near his cottage, gazing up at a riot of stars and the cloud of the Milky Way arching overhead. It was even more glorious than he’d remembered from his years wandering the Sierra Nevada and Canadian Rockies with his parents. Those were blissfully innocent times. An escape from a childhood otherwise spent enduring therapeutic efforts to “fix” him. He credited his parents with saving him from that.

Psychosis was a mental disorder whereby a person lost contact with external reality. And to all outward appearances the young Jon Grady did not engage with reality. As a toddler he had stared in wonder at things unseen, absorbed in his own world. Thought to be suffering from severe autism, he spent most of his early years under specialized care—not uttering his first words until the age of five.

And yet those first words were a complete sentence: “I want to go home now.”

And home he went, to all appearances noticing the outside world more each day.

It wasn’t until Grady was seven years old that his mother helped him understand that other people did not perceive numbers as colors—that five was not a deep indigo, nor three a vermilion red. Likewise musical tones were not part of most people’s mathematics. Grady “heard” math as he pored through its logic. Discordant notes were immediately evident. Mathematical concepts took on specific shapes in his mind relative to one another. At times the shape and sound of math problems seemed somehow wrong. Cacophonous.