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I staggered to my feet and stumbled over to the bed, where I collapsed atop the covers and curled into a ball, huggingand barely able to breathe Somewhere in the middle of all that, I fell asleep
I dreamed of funerals So in front of a roo to pretend he knehat he was doing Those were the good dreams Those were the dreams that reflected life as I knew it Other times--most of the times--it was his face on the picture in front of the funereal urn, and either I was delivering a eulogy in a robotichoas only a one, no one really expected anything else
The room was dark when I opened my eyes They ached in a totally unfah to free a hand to rub thehtly tender I considered getting upset about it, but dismissed the idea Either this was a norht to be concerned, and I was starting to amplify If it was the first, I needed to learn to live with it If it was the second, well Itto beto make out shapes in the darkened room Even with the retinal Kellis-Amberlee, I probably couldn’t have seen in a roo to do for a few seconds, while I waited for hts settle down into so norain, I hadn’t usually just come back from the dead Maybe I needed to cut myself a little slack
Minutes slipped bynu there, paralyzed by the simple reality of the dark "Fuck that," Ia little as my feet hit the floor There Step one had been successfully taken: I was standing up Everything else could come from there
If I remembered correctly, the ith the door would be about six feet in front offace-first into anything solid I felt a little better with every step I was up I was doing so ie’s pre-Rising horrori how effective si people Reporters use it whenever we think we can get aith it We try to be the ones in control of the environ from props and street noise to temperature to keep people either co on the needs of the piece Well, the CDC was trying to disorient ht into their hands Who cared if I was a clone ofkept under lock and key in a secret facility soia Mason--call it "identity until proven otherwise" And if I was going to be Georgia Mason, I couldn’t sit around feeling sorry for
My hands hit the one-way razed the surface of the glass If I squinted, I couldto look through a thick layer of fog; if the lights in the hall hadn’t been on, I wouldn’t have been able to see anything at all As it was, I was only getting outlines The walls The equally deceptive "s" looking in on those other, e for their own secretly cloned residents? Was I the first, the last, or soI needed to think about--probably at great length, and potentially as part of an exposé on illegal hu conducted by the CDC--but this wasn’t the time Here and now, it didn’t matter if they had a damn army of clones I was the only clone I cared about
I was the only…
I stepped away fro into the darkness in front ofme on a hidden video feed--and I had absolute faith that the CDC wasme on a hidden video feed, that’s what hidden video feeds are for--they’d probably think I was having a seizure Let them think what they wanted My frozen stare was as close as I could allowthe air in raw triuic puzzle, I had to give the the truth ahead of all other things, and I know a lie when I don’t hear one Dr Thoive me any firm answers… and that was the problem He said he was sorry for my loss He wouldn’t let me have an Internet connection, not even one that wasn’t capable of trans And he never, not once, went so far as to say that Shaun was dead Why wouldn’t he tell me Shaun was dead?
Because he didn’t have any proof The old Internet rallying cry: pics or it didn’t happen There was no way he could invent a believable story that I wouldn’t be able to poke holes in, and if he’d been telling the truth, he would have been happy to prove it
Shaun was alive
I could be a clone, up could be down, and black could be white, but Shaun had to be alive If I were in their shoes, the only thing that would have convinced me to clone a potentially recalcitrant reporter--and let’s face it, I was renowned forto tell me what to do--was the need to have that specific reporter on htfor the I could do that no one else could