At which point, she no doubt would have turned around and punched me.
Or not.
I walk faster. It’s downhill, so I can make good time. Is it possible she hasn’t realized that I left with the drive? No, no way. Dammit.
Why did I?
Because I was scared. And I am never scared.
The Embarcadero is in view. Traffic is starting to pick up. The trolleys go shrieking past. There are a pair of old gay dudes walking hand-in-hand with a tiny dog on a leash. There’s a street guy checking the trash for cans. There’s a business chick in a gray skirt suit and sneakers. I wonder if she’s the lawyer whose office I misappropriated.
I push through a mini-crowd of commuters and march purposefully toward the pier warehouse, where I will grab Eve and kiss the living hell out of her. No. First I’ll ask her whether I should or should not destroy her mother and her family business.
I stop at the edge of the pier. Something is wrong. I feel it. So I stop.
And it’s too late. Because there are two guys behind me, standing way too close.
“We have guns!”
I turn to look at them. It’s Dr. Chen and Dr. Anapura. Big Brains. Chen is in his forties. He has a chronically startled look behind glasses he thinks make him look hip. Anapura is a woman about fifteen years older than I am. She has a long braid down her back that nearly touches her… well, it’s really long.
“You guys absolutely do not have guns,” I say.
Chen points meaningfully and nervously to a bulge beneath his jacket.
Anapura pulls something from her coat pocket that looks like a can of hair spray. It’s not.
She hoses me with it, I say something brilliant like, “Hey!” and then the world goes swirly.
I can’t say that I expect to wake up anywhere in particular. But where I do wake up is not in the pier warehouse.
The mildew smell is gone. So is the sound of water sloshing against the pilings. There’s something in the taste of the air that’s familiar.
I’m back at Spiker.
Strong hands grab me. There’s a hood over my head. I’m being hauled up to my feet and pushed forward. They’ve taken my shoes. My bare feet are on carpeting. My hands are tied behind me. I sense that there are at least three or four people around me.
We go through a door.
“Wha—” I start to say, and only then does my befuddled mind realize there’s a piece of duct tape over my mouth.
More doors. An elevator.
We’re going down.
Out of the elevator, through a locked door—I hear them keying the combination—and then we’re on another elevator. Going down again.
Going down to where? There is nothing this far down. I know the Spiker campus like I know my own face. There is no second set of elevators. There is no sub-basement.
And yet there is.
The elevator stops and I am shoved out. I stumble. I smack into something hard and unyielding, like a wall, only not. I feel it as it slides past my cheek: a steel support column.
The hood is snatched from my head.
The light is dim, ancient fluorescent cylinders way up high, hanging from unfinished concrete. We’re in a large space, the size of a high school gym. Tanks of various shapes and sizes are everywhere. Tall cylinders, horizontal cylinders, giant steel-bolted aquariums.
There are objects, creatures, in many but not all of these tanks. Nearest to me, most visible, is something that must once have been a gorilla. It’s been shaved, or worse yet, deliberately designed to be hairless. It looks like a wrinkled, sagging, old bodybuilder with skin the color of licorice. It’s not alive, at least I hope it isn’t, because it’s jammed tightly into the vertical cylinder.
I count four men and one woman. Dr. Chen, Dr. Gold, Martinez, a grad student working on his PhD, and a guy named Sullivan, who works in accounting. Dr. Anapura is the only woman.
The missing person, the sixth, is standing behind me.
“Solo Plissken,” Tattooed Tommy says, a regretful tone in his voice.
I size up the people facing me. Chen and Anapura are the tough ones. The rest are scared and unsure of themselves.
“Plissken?” Martinez echoes. “As in…?”
“You didn’t know that?” Tommy said. “You are missing out on the good gossip, dude.” He moves around to a spot where I can see him. “Yes, Plissken, ‘as in.’ Dr. Jeffrey Plissken and his lovely wife, Isabel. As in what, three major, groundbreaking, Nobel-bait papers?”
I glare at Tommy. He rips the tape from my mouth.
“Leave my parents out of this,” I say with my first breath.
“He’s a gofer,” Martinez protests. “He runs things through the autoclave.”
Tommy looks at me, as if it’s my job to explain.
“He’s actually quite bright, it turns out,” Tommy says. “His parents had, what, an average IQ in the 170 range? There’s been some reversion to the mean, of course, so I don’t believe bagel boy is quite in that league, but oh, he’s smart. Aren’t you, Solo?”
He leans close, cocky. He’s enjoying performing for his crew. I jerk my head forward hard, a head butt.
I miss. But I make him jump back.
It’s not enough to ruin his triumphant mood.
“How did you find me?” I demand.
“Well, Solo, you come with a few interesting modifications. I assume you know that you were given the same potential to heal as your little girlfriend.”
Of course I know.
“She’s not my girlfriend,” I say. Which is a stupid and dorky thing to insist on.
“You haven’t tapped that little piece yet? She’s no great beauty, but she’s cute enough, and she’s got a nice little body.”
“I’d do her,” Dr. Chen says.
Dr. Anapura says, “There’s no need to be sexist, Doctor.”
Tommy is irritated, but he continues. “My guys weren’t that far behind you. Clever, losing them in the fog, but they found where you’d docked. They caught a glimpse of you heading east on the Embarcadero. I know the location of Austin Spiker’s studio. Two plus two. Give me some credit.”
“But you don’t have Eve,” I say.
“Mmm. Not yet. She’d been there but she’s gone. For her own safety we need to find her. So tell me. Where?”
“Will it bother you very much if I say, ‘screw you’?”
He grins. “Kind of expected it. It’s okay. We have your flash drive. And in a few hours we’ll have you doing whatever we like, including getting the girl.”
“You going to beat me?”
“No. We’re going to clone you. Going to make ourselves a whole new Solo. Thanks to the Plissken process, we can transfer—and edit—your memories for implantation in the clone. He’ll tell us.”
“The Plissken process. I’m honored.”
“Oh, it’s not named for you, bagel boy. It’s named for the geniuses who invented it, along with the accelerated cloning process itself.”
He lets it sink in. His eyes are bright with anticipation.
I blink and look away. I don’t mean to.
“Yes, young Plissken, that’s right. That’s the truth of it. Terra Spiker? She’s an A-plus businesswoman, but
