“What on earth prompted that?” she asked icily. “What’s gotten into you lately?”

“Nothing’s gotten into me,” he snapped. “The kid needs to grow up. Someone around here has to be the bad guy. It might as well be me.”

“Oh, come on. That’s ridiculous. He’s not doing anything wrong. He’s a kid. He’s playing his games. What’s so bad about that? You think he’s the only kid his age who does this?”

“Yeah, well, I don’t care about other kids. We need to have some limits.”

“Jesus, Jeremiah. There are limits,” she said. “He knows that, and you would, too, if you bothered to pay attention. I’ve already told him that he can play until he goes to bed once he’s done his homework. He needs his downtime, you know.”

“Yeah, well, now there are more limits. What’s so wrong with that?”

Diana had called him unreasonable. Looking back on it, he could understand why.

“I would have liked to apologize,” he told Dr. Young now. “I should have said something. But what could I say?”

Dr. Young was quiet for a moment and looked at Jeremiah as though she might have something comforting to offer. But in typical fashion, she didn’t, and only gave him another question.

“How long have you and Diana been married?”

“Almost sixteen years.” As he said it, he was struck by the fact that it would be his clone celebrating his wedding anniversary in a few months.

“And Parker, he’s sixteen?”

“Yes, last month actually.” Jeremiah noted a look of mock surprise on her face. “I think I can see where this is going,” he said. “Yes, we got married in a hurry. But you do what you need to do, right? I don’t think any of this is relevant to the experiment.”

“Everything is relevant to this experiment, Jeremiah. I’m simply trying to establish some background. We need that.”

“Seems to me you got all the background you needed when we took the Meld together. Wasn’t that the idea of taking it before the cloning? To get a baseline? Some background?”

“Well, yes,” she said, “but the Meld doesn’t always give a complete picture. And what we do glean from it is somewhat dependent on what you’re thinking about at the time it’s administered. It isn’t a precise science.”

“From what they told me this morning, that drug is a hell of a lot more precise than I ever thought it was,” he said. “Did you know it can be used to implant false memories? That’s what they did to the clone.”

“It works differently in that scenario,” she explained. “With a physical connection everything can be recorded and manipulated as needed. The way you and I use it, it isn’t anywhere near as exact. I can control it, but not to that extent.”

“What good is it, then?”

“It’s extremely useful,” she said flatly. “It offers a sharing of feeling, thought processes, impulse reactions, things like that. More importantly, for our purposes, it illuminates self-perception and self-awareness. It affords me a glimpse of how you see yourself in the world.”