Blackout

of all this was proving that the CDC can conquer death. I don’t understand all the science. My field is virology and corporate espionage, not human cloning and memory transfer. But I’ve seen your charts, and while you’re not a perfect replica of yourself, you have a ninety-seven percent accuracy rating. You’re as close as science can get to bringing a person back from the dead.”

“But how?”

“Neural snapshotting.”

I had to allow that it made sense, as much as I understood it, which wasn’t all that well. Thought, memory, everything that makes a person who they are, it’s all electricity, little sparks and flashes encoded in the gray matter of our minds. The Kellis-Amberlee virus takes us over, but it also preserves the brain long after the point of what should be death. It turns those electrical impulses back on, over and over again. If the CDC had a way of taking a picture of those electrical patterns, and then somehow imprinting them on a blank mind… it could work.

I shook my head, frowning at Gregory. “How can you be so calm?”

“How can you?” he shot back. “You’re not the first Georgia I’ve brought here, although you’re the most accurate. The highest transfer score before yours was seventy-five. She started screaming as soon as she saw the clone, and she didn’t stop. You’re the only one who hasn’t cried.”

“I’ll cry later, I promise,” I said, and I meant it. This was the sort of thing that needed to be processed before I could really let myself get upset. “How close is she? If I’m the ninety-seven percent girl, what’s she?”

“Subject 8b has been prepared through a modified conditioning process, which should, if fully successful, result in a forty-four percent accuracy rating when compared to the original, but with some behavioral adjustments,” said Gregory. “She’ll look like you. She’ll act like you…”

“She won’t be me,” I finished. “So what’s she for?”

For the first time since we’d arrived in the lab, Gregory looked at me like I’d said something wrong. “You mean you don’t know?” he asked.

“No. How would I—” I stopped mid-sentence, a sudden horrible certainty flooding over me. “They wouldn’t.”

“Wouldn’t what?”

Somehow, the one word I needed to say was harder to force out than all the others had been. “Shaun?”

Gregory nodded. “That’s the plan. You’ll stay here as long as you’re useful, and she’ll be put where he can find her. Mr. Mason is not particularly stable these days, and they’re reasonably sure he’ll believe whatever he’s told if he thinks it’s going to get you back. He’s not going to ask questions. He’s not going to look for double-crosses. He’s just going to open the doors and let her in.”

My lips thinned into a hard line. Maybe I wasn’t really who I thought I was. Maybe I wasn’t really anyone at all—if I wasn’t Georgia Mason, but I shared her DNA and ninety-seven percent of her personality profile, who else could I be? The one thing I was absolutely sure of was that none of that mattered, because these bastards were not going to use my genetic code to honey-trap the only human being in this world that I had ever been willing to die for.

“Then that’s just not going to happen,” I said. “What do we need to do?”

Gregory glanced at his watch. “Right now, we need to get you back to your room before our window closes. I should be able to get another message to you tomorrow night. You need to keep your eyes open. Keep behaving normally. They’re not going to take you off display unless you do something that makes it look like you’re beginning to destabilize.”

“By ‘take me off display,’ you mean kill me, right?”

He nodded.

“Got it,” I said. “And after that?”

“After that?” said Gregory. He smiled a little, clearly trying to look encouraging. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that all he was really managing to do was look scared. “I think it’s about time that we got you out of here, don’t you?”

“My thoughts exactly,” I said. “Let’s go.”

I don’t know why I bother writing these entries. It feels less like a blog and more like a diary every day, like I should be drawing hearts in the margins and writing stupid shit like “OMG I wonder if he’ll ever get over his stupid dead sister and love me” or “wish I could go shopping, I’ve had to burn half my favorite shirts due to contamination.” But it’s routine, and it’s a form of saying “fuck you” to the people who’ve driven us to this. Fuck you, government conspiracy. Fuck you, CDC. We’ll keep writing, and someday, we’ll be able to post again, and when that happens, you’d better pray we have something better to talk about than you.

But I don’t think we will.

Shaun is starting to crack. He’s covering it well, but I can see the fractures. During the outbreak yesterday, there were points where he just

froze

. It was like he wasn’t even a part of the situation anymore. I don’t know if he knows he’s doing it, and I’m scared. I’m scared he’s going to get one of us killed, and he’s never going to forgive himself. I’m scared he’s going to get even worse, and we’re going to let him, because we love him, and because we loved Georgia.

And I’m still going to follow him to Florida. God. My mother was right. I really am an idiot.

—From Charming Not Sincere, the blog of Rebecca Atherton, July 25, 2041. Unpublished.

She remained calm and reasonable throughout the encounter. She was able to ask coherent questions and give coherent answers. She remained controlled during the walk back to her room, and was able to return to her bed and feign normal sleep successfully enough to convince the orderly who came to relieve me. Stress fractures are still possible, but I believe we should continue as planned. I think this one is stable.

—Taken from a message sent by Dr. Gregory Lake, July 25, 2041. Recipient unknown.

Ten

The morning dawned bright and clean, with a clear blue sky that afforded absolutely no cloud cover. Any spy satellites that happened to pick up on our anomalous route—not many people take the back roads anymore, and fewer still do it in a way that allows them to skip all security checkpoints—would have a perfect line of sight.

“If we get picked up by the DEA on suspicion of being Canadian marijuana smugglers, I’m going to be pissed,” I muttered.

Becks looked up from her tablet, fingers still tracing an intricate dance across the screen. It was sort of unnerving that she could do that by nothing but the memory of where her apps were installed. I need a keyboard, or I lose my place in seconds. “What’s that?”

“Nothing.” I kept my eyes on the road.

Liar.

I didn’t answer. We’d get into a fight if I did, and then Becks would have to pretend she didn’t mind sitting there listening while I argued with myself. Back at the lab, she’d been able to leave the room when that started. Now that we were on the road again, she had nowhere to run. And neither did I.

The reality of what we were doing was starting to sink in. Dr. Abbey had insisted we get some sleep after the lab cleanup was finished—although not before she’d drawn enough blood from me to keep her surviving lab monkeys busy for a couple of weeks. “Some of us have to work while you take your little road trip,” she’d said, like this was some sort of exciting pleasure cruise. Just me and Becks and the ghost of George, sailing gaily down the highway to meet our certain doom.

Not that we were actually on the highway unless we absolutely had to be. Dr. Abbey had installed a new module on our GPS, one programmed with all the underground and questionably secure stops between Shady Cove and Berkeley. Once that was done, Alaric and Mahir worked together to reprogram our mapping software, convincing it the roads we should take were the ones the system flagged as “least desirable.” So