Fareed heard Gregory Duff Collingsworth climbing the stairs to the roof. In a moment the faint low thrumming beat of Gregory’s heart was no longer audible.

The hair stood up on Fareed’s neck. A rodent worked in the walls somewhere near him, behind the lacquered paneling. A small car passed in the street.

He was suddenly aware of how very excited he was, how very excited by the mystery of this woman, and how much he enjoyed it, no matter how disturbing it was.

He went at the keyboard again, fingers moving too fast even for his eyes, trusting to the feel of the keys and his unerring knowledge of them, the codes racing down the monitor, as he scanned the video surveillance system of Collingsworth Pharmaceuticals and digested all of its systems and limits.

He identified the live feed now from Dr. Karen Rhinehart’s laboratories and found them empty. No surprise. It was early morning in Geneva as well, of course, only three hours away from Paris by train. Now he brought up the archive of dated tapes and soon found strong, clear footage from two nights prior that revealed the subject, Dr. Rhinehart, seated on a stool before a laboratory counter, making notes with what seemed an old-fashioned black fountain pen on a white pad. A mug of steaming coffee or tea sat beside her. She wrote in brief bursts, paused as if to think, then continued writing. Now and then her left hand moved through her long loose hair.

A preternatural stillness gripped her. Her few gestures were startlingly deliberate, and her long periods of immobility strange. When she moved her hand to write, nothing else about her moved, not the angle of her head, or the fingers of her idle hand. He was powerfully fascinated. Clone, droid, cyborg, replicant—the common vernacular words for human duplicates ran through his mind, detached from the various fictions that had engendered them.

A half hour of this footage passed and then he recognized an exact repeat of an earlier gesture, an earlier lifting of the coffee cup, an earlier rake of the left hand through the hair. The woman had blocked the camera with a digital loop. Of course. He fast-forwarded to confirm: the loop ran for the rest of that evening and night.

Well, they might be geniuses, the mortal employees scanning or storing this material, but likely the value of this system depended solely on someone seeking to retrieve a particular moment for a particular use. And likely nobody had.

A little annoyed, Fareed fast-forwarded swiftly through hours of footage, most of it of group sessions, group discussions, and work by young doctors who were not Dr. Rhinehart, and only now and then did she flash before the camera on her way across the screen.