Brent eyed him with measured attention, which made Jeremiah instantly uncomfortable. He wasn’t certain, after all, how much he could actually trust Brent. Charles Scott still signed his paychecks.
“I don’t know,” he told Brent. “I’m not thinking clearly. I think I’m just tired.”
He’d been living with these feelings for a while, wondering how it was possible to watch his own replica and not like him. Every day, as the viewing was set to begin, Jeremiah would feel his stomach tighten and his face harden into an expression of contempt, which he found more and more difficult to conceal. He watched with gritted teeth as his double wormed his way around his day, never fully engaging in anything, seemingly oblivious to the fact that his awkward insecurity came across as unwarranted conceit. In every conversation, he was only marginally there, only as much as he needed to be, never vested, and answering questions with abrupt predictability. He never pursued anything from anyone around him. Never initiated a discussion himself. He never asked a question or wondered out loud. At home, too, he seemed stuck on the edges, just halfway in. He wouldn’t attempt any honest connection with either Diana or Parker and he all but pushed them away if they ever tried it with him.
“Can we go to a movie tonight, Dad?” Parker asked once. “We haven’t been to a movie in ages.”
“Anything you could possibly want to see ends up on TV for free in two months, anyway,” the clone told him. “Nobody goes to the movies anymore.” Jeremiah had been livid at that. It was a missed opportunity and he wanted to jump inside the wall and throttle that clone. He was an idiot.
Was he expecting too much of his double? Despite fleeting moments of a kind of empathy for the clone, he knew the thing on the wall wasn’t really human. How, he reasoned, could something so unnatural even be expected to live and engage? He might walk and talk and breathe, but there had to be something missing from the clone, some elemental spark, some God particle, some essence. A soul?
Thoughts like that didn’t typically clutter Jeremiah’s mind and the fact that he thought about them now shocked him slightly. He had no unshakable faith in anything higher than the sky, but watching that clone haunt his own world, day in and day out, made him question things he’d never considered. It had begun to interfere with his sleep.
One morning, just after four, he gave up, threw back the covers and got out of bed. Better to just find something to do, he decided, rather than lie in bed wide awake. He didn’t have a book he was reading at the moment and didn’t feel like watching TV. He was antsy. He tried the treadmill for a few minutes and then gave up on that, too.
Finally, and without any conscious decision on his part, he found himself sitting on the living room couch, headset on and controller in hand, playing his first solo round of Infinite Frontiers or, as Brent had started referring to it, IF. Trying to recall the correct sequence of buttons it took to fire his machine gun and rummaging the 3-D war-torn landscape for med kits and discarded rations made for a good distraction. One needed to concentrate, after all, to avoid stepping on a land mine or getting shot in the head by some mindless AI sniper. It took effort, too, Jeremiah discovered, not to shoot his foot off with his own gun, a maneuver he seemed to have mastered without even trying.
After dying several unceremonious deaths and respawning in roughly the same spot he’d started at, he decided to work on his avatar instead. How many times had Brent chided him, after all, for continuing to play as the default image of a nondescript American soldier named Player 2?
The choices were many and intricate, starting with species and ending somewhere around eyebrow shape and shoelace color. If he wanted to, Jeremiah could literally have played the game as a bipedal alligator in an evening gown. But he went with something slightly more menacing.
Slowly, attribute by attribute, his avatar, whom he called Clyde, came into being. He was a stocky, stern-faced ex-marine (or so Jeremiah imagined) dressed in camouflage pants and a tattered Ramones T-shirt, which was bursting from the force of his muscular chest. He wore a military surplus helmet over messy, dirty blond hair, and goggles that looked like they were salvaged from an industrial waste site. He had a cache of weapons on his person that included an assault rifle, two handguns, a machete and a blade he concealed in one of his hobnail boots. Once he leveled up a few times, Jeremiah had his eye on a sweet Uzi and a grenade launcher, but he didn’t have the points for either yet. Standard-issue grenades were clipped in a ready row on his belt, and his pack contained ammo, med kits and rations enough to last a virtual month or more.
He sat and tweaked Clyde’s appearance for over an hour, playing with the skin tone and trying out different placements for battle scars and tattoos. In the end, though, he opted to hold off on the ink altogether, deciding that tattoos would be used to mark his eventual kills. And Jeremiah planned on many victories, even if he hadn’t come close to one yet.
When he finally positioned the nose just right and had firmly decided against a bandanna, the living room door
