For the next half hour, Jeremiah engaged in a gleeful, surreal and violent battle with Parker. Despite how much he’d been practicing, he was hard-pressed to even keep up with his son. Parker was good at this, and Jeremiah had to work just to keep the tenuous connection going. One mistake and he feared the game would be over. He resisted the considerable urge to stop firing and just start typing all the things he wished he could tell him. He wanted so desperately to talk to him, to have even a casual conversation—to ask him about school, music, other games he’d been playing—but he knew he couldn’t do that. Instead, he let Clyde do the interacting for him. Every grenade he launched, every blast from his gun, every duck and cover, felt like a little step closer into Parker’s life.

When it was over—only when Parker’s avatar accidentally stepped on a land mine and blew himself to bits—Jeremiah was caught off guard by his own disappointment. He could have stayed there all night.

Good game, Clyde, Parker typed onto the side of the screen.

Jeremiah looked at Brent.

“Answer him if you want to,” he said. “Go ahead.”

Thanks, he typed, his hands shaking visibly. You, too.

The connection severed, Jeremiah slumped back against the couch and took off his headgear. He sighed heavily and didn’t even attempt to stop the tears he felt stinging the back of his eyes.

“I don’t think I can do that again,” he said to Brent. “It’s just too hard.”

Chapter 24

Day 145

On a Tuesday evening, Jeremiah and Brent sat down to view the clone as he was arriving home from work. Jeremiah leaned back against the couch and opened his third light beer of the evening, hoping it might help him sleep later, and Brent, businesslike and dressed in his lab coat, pretended he hadn’t been counting. Jeremiah didn’t care one way or the other.

The camera came on and showed an inside view of the front door of Jeremiah’s home opening onto the hallway, a patch of evening sunlight illuminating the dust bunnies on the floor. He heard Louie’s tags jingle and saw the dog walk sheepishly into the room and yawn when he saw it was the clone and not someone more interesting, like the mailman or a complete stranger.

“Hey there, pal,” the clone said uselessly, leaning down to scratch the dog behind the ears. Louie acquiesced, but just barely, and shook his head away after only a second or two. “Where is everyone?”

Tossing his keys on the small table in the hallway, the clone walked into the dining room and through to the kitchen, calling as he went. “Diana? Parker? Anybody home?”

No one answered. He opened the refrigerator and grabbed a soda from the door. He looked around the room for a note or some hint of dinner in the oven, but the lights weren’t even on. It appeared that no one had been home all day. Jeremiah could see the clock on the oven. It was twenty past seven. There should have been someone home by now. Parker should have been pretending to do homework while playing some computer game in his room. The clone called out again as he went upstairs. Louie followed slowly, keeping his distance from the clone, but wondering, certainly, whether anyone was going to even consider letting him outside.