Brent left the room and came back a few minutes later, shaking his head in a way that suggested he’d found it. Jeremiah put two more ice cubes into the blender and turned the setting up to Puree.
“I swear, Jeremiah, I had no idea.” Brent held his hands up at his shoulders in a show of innocence. “I had no clue. Are there any others?”
“Not that I could find, and believe me, I looked. Why am I being watched?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Scott wants to see what happens when you’re watching the clone? The way the camera is facing, toward the center of the room, that’s the only thing he could see, I think—us on the couch when we’re watching the monitor.” He paused and shook his head slowly again. “I’m being watched, too, I guess. Maybe he’s doing it to make sure my reports are accurate. I don’t know. But I swear I had nothing to do with this. I had no idea.”
“So, what do we do? Cover it up? Take it out?”
“I don’t think so,” Brent told him. “I mean, that won’t do anything but show Scott we’re onto it. Maybe the best thing to do is just leave it there. For now at least.”
“Doesn’t it bother you?” Jeremiah asked.
“Of course it bothers me. But what else can we do? We just have to be careful, is all. We just have to watch what we say in there. Maybe slow down on the beers, I guess. Besides,” he added, “we’re not even certain it’s working. Maybe it isn’t even hooked up. For all we know it could be a decoy, maybe he wanted us to find it just to keep us on our toes. We could test it, I think.”
“How?” Jeremiah added more ice to the blender and let it go. If Scott could hear through that device, he certainly wouldn’t hear them talking.
“Easy. I can take it out and hook it up to the monitor. It’ll tell us if it’s active or not.”
“Won’t he notice that?”
“He’s not in the building right now. I just came from his office. He was leaving for a meeting. He won’t be back until this afternoon.”
Jeremiah switched off the blender. “Could have told me before I used up half my ice,” he said. “But what if he has someone else monitoring the thing? How do we know he doesn’t record it and watch everything later?”
“Look,” Brent said, “we either do this right now or we don’t. I say we do it. We have to find out.”
He went into the living room and Jeremiah followed.
“Help me get this off the wall.” Brent already had his hands positioned on one side of the mammoth painting. Jeremiah took the other end and, together, they lifted it up and off its hook. “Hold it there,” Brent told him, peering behind the canvas. “Okay, it’s definitely wired. Put it back, I’m going to take it out from the front.”
Jeremiah watched as Brent gingerly twisted the tiny camera until it wriggled loose. He pulled it slowly outward, dangling by its wire, and then stopped to check something.
“Do you know what you’re doing?”
“Yeah, I know what I’m doing. I’m a scientist, remember? It’s not brain surgery.” He disconnected the camera and the painting was left with an odd little hole where the wire came out.
“Now,” Brent said, “I just need to access the cables behind the monitor. It should be just behind this panel.” He lifted a small door in the wall, just below the monitor, that Jeremiah had never noticed before.
“Is this going to take long?” Jeremiah asked. “If that monitor is disconnected when the viewing starts, someone’s going to notice.”
“We have time. I’ll have this hooked up in a few minutes. Why don’t you go make me a smoothie or something?”
“Fuck you.”
“Then leave me alone and let me do this.” He pulled a thin cable out from the wall until he had enough slack to work with, hooked the end of it to something on the back of the camera and smiled. “There,” he said. “Done. Turn it on.”
Jeremiah moved in front of Brent, grabbed the remote and hit the button. With Brent standing directly behind him, aiming the camera at the monitor, what appeared before him was mesmerizing: an image of the back of his own head, watching the monitor, which showed an image of his head watching the monitor, which showed his head again watching the monitor, and so on, seemingly into infinity. The effect was dizzying, so much so that he thought he might topple over if he looked at it too long.
“Well, it works,” Brent said.
“Turn it off,” Jeremiah told him. “Put it back.”
“It’s kind of cool, isn’t it?” Brent began moving the camera slowly back and forth, making the image on the wall—and all of its infinite reflections—waver, until Jeremiah thought he might actually get sick.
“Knock it off, Brent.” Jeremiah hit the button on the remote.
The wall monitor went black and Jeremiah sat down while Brent put everything back to where it had been. When he was finished, there was no indication anything had been tampered with.
“So, what do we do now?” he asked when Brent sat down on the couch. “Now that we know it’s real?”
“Nothing,” Brent told him. “Like I said, we just be careful. We be ourselves and we do our jobs. That’s all.”
“Easy for you to say. But I actually live here.”
“Well,” Brent said with a smirk, “then I wouldn’t dance naked in front of the painting if I were you, difficult as that may be.”
A few minutes later, the monitor switched on. As Jeremiah watched the clone stumble through four hours of his workday, he found it unsettling to realize that he was now the watcher and that his double had no idea.
Chapter 17
Day 94
Jeremiah spent an uncomfortable week in his rooms. He ate his meals standing at the counter in the kitchen, and spent a lot of time in the bedroom, but he couldn’t
