Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1

Day 1

The first time he saw his own replica, laid out on a bed, its eyes closed as though it might be dreaming, Jeremiah choked on his own breath. He’d never seen himself from this angle before. There was a slackness to the skin around the jawline; it draped down slightly on either side of the face in a way that was distinctly unattractive. He was riveted—enthralled and repulsed all at once.

“It’s uncanny, isn’t it? The resemblance?” Dr. Charles Scott spoke with his typical detachment, which, in the moment, Jeremiah wished he could share. But that was his own image he was looking at, exact in even the smallest detail. For him, detachment was impossible.

His eyes zeroed in on a dry, pinkish patch on the clone’s left cheek and Jeremiah absently lifted a hand to the same spot on his own face, where he’d scraped himself with a worn razor just a few days ago. Uncanny resemblance didn’t begin to describe what was on that bed.

It was uniquely unsettling, like standing on the face of a mirror. His mind couldn’t work out where his own body began and ended.

“Is it... Is he alive?” Without thinking, without actually wanting to, he reached a tentative hand out to touch his double.

Scott deftly blocked Jeremiah’s hand with his own. “Oh, yes, very much alive. At least in a biological sense.”

His eyes wandered from the face for a moment and only then did Jeremiah notice the steady, slow rise and fall of the clone’s chest.

The thing was breathing.

“What other kind of alive is there?” he asked.

“At the moment, the clone is nothing but a shell. He has no mind, no inner workings. He’s empty.” Scott looked quickly from the clone back to Jeremiah, with an expression that suggested smug satisfaction. “Once we input your neural platform—your memories and synaptic patterns—then he’ll be alive in a more definitive manner.”

“Unbelievable,” Jeremiah said. “It’s really unbelievable.”

“And the whole process shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours,” Scott told him. “Once we administer the Meld you will be neurologically connected until the procedure is complete.”

Almost as if on cue, Dr. Philip Pike entered the room, setting down a tray with two syringes. He barely acknowledged Jeremiah’s presence with a nod, but immediately checked the clone’s pulse and then dispensed something from a dropper into each of its eyes. He made a careful scan of the medical monitors around the clone’s bed and jotted hurried notes on a clipboard. Once he seemed satisfied with whatever the readings told him, he began to affix a tangle of colored wires to various points on the clone’s head. He did all of this in silence and at a pace that might have suggested he had somewhere more important to be, although Jeremiah knew that was certainly not the case. At the moment, he thought, this small hospital room, tucked away in a hidden basement of ViMed Pharmaceutical, was the epicenter of the entire scientific universe—and only a handful of people were privy to that fact. Somehow, inconceivably, Jeremiah was at the heart of the whole thing.