“Even with all of the ethical implications? The laws against it? That doesn’t concern you?”

“Well,” Brent said, “they make a lot of things illegal that probably don’t need to be. I’m not talking about whole clone armies or cloning the pope. There are good uses, too. I think that’s worth preserving.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, what if we could clone da Vinci or Albert Einstein or Shakespeare?”

“Yeah, but it wouldn’t really be them. Without the Meld they don’t actually have minds of their own. How do we know what they’d decide to do? Who’s to say a clone would even come close to the genius of the originals? What if a clone Shakespeare started writing zombie fiction? What if Einstein’s clone decided he’d rather just be a barber? Besides, you saw the emails. We both know they don’t want to clone Shakespeare.”

“This technology works,” Brent said. “In the hands of the right people it could still do a lot of good. I’m sorry, but I still think that’s why Scott is doing this. That’s the point of this whole thing.”

Jeremiah laughed. “That’s not the point. Why is Scott actually doing this? What is he getting out of it? Ask yourself that. What’s his end game? Why is this so important to him? It isn’t the science. Believe me.”

“Fine. If you want to look at it like that. There’s money to be made. There are patents and rights. There’s power. ViMed is going to get the lion’s share of that for the next hundred years or more, and Charles Scott is at the helm. What’s so wrong about that? Jesus, they’ll probably call the whole procedure the Scott Method or something. That’s immortality, Jeremiah.”

Jeremiah shook his head and smiled. How could someone manage to be so correct and so off the mark at the same time?

He wasn’t going to be able to convince Brent of anything. Not yet. Not in time to help Diana. If he was going to do something, he’d have to find a way to do it on his own.

“Immortality,” he said finally. “You’re probably right.”

They went to the living room, where Brent took his lab coat from the closet, and Jeremiah fell heavily onto the couch and put his feet up on the coffee table, trying to appear more relaxed, even as his mind was racing for a solution.

“Another exciting afternoon watching my very successful double duplicate my every move at the office,” he said. “The suspense is killing me. You think he’s going to dial the phone with his left hand or his right? Yeah, this science is all so important.”

“Quit complaining,” Brent said. “If you’re that bored, then we’ll just play cards while he works.” He sat down and began dealing out cards for poker. “Stud High,” he said, and threw a beer bottle cap into the pot, in lieu of money, which Jeremiah hadn’t seen or needed in several months.

Two rounds in and several bottle caps richer, Jeremiah looked up from a lousy hand when the clone took a phone call that, judging from his expression, was anything but good news. It was a quick and one-sided conversation, but Jeremiah heard enough to grasp that the Meld shit was about to hit the fan again in a big way.