And he was still fixated on the notion that he had to keep Louie a secret, too. As he watched the clone every day, infiltrating and taking over every aspect of his life, it was his dog’s loyalty that somehow kept him tethered. He needed it more than he thought was logical, but with everything that had happened, it seemed like all he had left.

No matter what that clone did to coax and cajole him, Louie wanted nothing to do with him. There was no aggression anymore—the medicine had seen to that—but there was a stubborn reluctance that could not be broken, and Jeremiah delighted in that. It felt like some sort of small victory. And it gave him some inexplicable gratification to know that Charles Scott’s grand experiment wasn’t as infallible as he probably thought it was. Every morning the clone would attempt, and every morning he would fail, to lure Louie onto the leash. Finally, he’d just give up and wake Parker to walk him before school, which never went over well.

“You know, it’s been scientifically proven that teenagers need more sleep than adults,” Parker informed the clone. “What the hell did you do to make this dog hate you, Dad? Kick him or something?”

Keeping that secret—just one small thing that he could be certain belonged, securely, to him—was becoming increasingly important to him. As Jeremiah obsessed on it, that knowledge almost came to signify his last remnant of personal self under this microscope. He wasn’t going to give it away.

So, some nights, when he couldn’t sleep, he’d find himself at the computer, searching for a way to control his own thoughts, even under the influence of Meld. In the dim glow of the monitor, he’d fuel himself on French roast and study articles on self-hypnosis, meditation and astral projection. He’d sit in the dark and practice sending his consciousness in willful directions until he realized the futility of it. He didn’t believe in any of this.

He’d usually end up trying to exhaust himself with an hour on the treadmill, staring blankly at vistas as dull as he could think to program into the monitor—an empty suburban street, a high school parking lot, a construction site left padlocked and vacant overnight. And if all else failed, he’d finally settle on the couch, put on the headset and play IF, blowing things up in satisfying blasts of virtual obliteration, not caring who was watching or what they might have thought. In time, all that practice gave Jeremiah enough confidence to challenge Brent outright.

“You really think you can take me?” Brent said after a particularly dull weekday afternoon viewing. “You’re on.” He opened two beers and took a seat on the couch.

“I’ve made a few adjustments,” Jeremiah told him. He turned on the game and donned his headset, and his avatar appeared on the wall in all his menacing glory. “Meet Clyde,” he said.

“Whoa, you have been busy. He looks pretty tough.”