Daniel Suarez - Influx

Morrison scowled at him. “You need to relax, Mr. Grady, or that collar’s going to have difficulty controlling your respiratory functions. We have all the genetic information necessary to make a copy of you, but as you might have noticed, that’s not the same thing as having you. ”

The lab technician halted his work and looked up at the ceiling. “Would you stop with this already?”

“I’m talking to this man, here. Do you see me talking to you? Was I talking to you?”

“I think you were talking to me in a way, yes.”

“Just get him prepped. The sooner we get these substandard Neanderthals out of here, the better.”

“I copy that.” The younger man sighed and turned back to his work.

Morrison glowered down at Grady again. Morrison looked old and tired as he rubbed his calloused, thick fingers against his closed eyes.

Grady felt the words forming as a means to keep his mind off the vertigo he was feeling. “Why are you doing this?”

Morrison looked up. “Doing what?”

“Taking away my life.”

“If the director says you need a time-out, then you need a time-out. Hibernity does a great job of changing people’s minds. Literally.”

Grady searched the man’s eyes for some human kindness. He saw none. “This is wrong.”

“Wrong. Right. They’re a matter of perspective. I’m sure gazelles think lions are wrong.”

“And you and your clones are the lions.”

“I’d say they’re more like hyenas.”

The lab technician slammed his computer tablet onto the counter. “Dad, give it a rest already.”

“What? I can’t talk to this poor unfortunate without getting comments from the peanut gallery?”

“I’m not gonna just stand here and listen to you talk shit.”

Morrison turned back to Grady. “You know why they cloned me back in the ’80s, Mr. Grady? Because I was the best special operator the U.S. military ever produced. High intelligence, top physical characteristics—the most determined to survive and overcome. To win. But as it turns out, genetics isn’t destiny—it’s statistics. After two decades it has become quite clear that something about us is not genetic.”

The younger clone interjected, “You don’t even understand the science: The seat of consciousness—what’s known as ‘sensorium’—exists partly as an expression of particle entanglement in higher physical dimensions. The human brain is merely a conduit.”

Morrison gestured toward his younger self. “My point exactly. That’s why none of you will ever be me.” He turned back to Grady. “Turns out you can’t copy people. Just flesh. Now it’s all biotech design. Like Granny Alexa up there.”

The lab technician glared. “Tau said you wanted us all liquidated.”

“Not all of you. Just the less-than-faithful reproductions.”

The lab technician still glared.

Morrison threw up his hands. “What do you want me to say?”

The clone stared hard at Morrison for several moments. “There are times when I feel like murdering you, sir.”

“Well, give it your best shot, son. Just don’t fail.”

They faced each other in tense silence.

Morrison finally grinned. “We share a predilection for homicide. Some of us are just better on the follow-through.”

The lab technician took a deep, calming breath. “I refuse to give in to my genetic predilections.”

“I rest my case.”

The technician turned away in disdain.

“Relax, Zeta. You’re one of the good ones.”

The lab tech looked up. “I’m finished. His file’s done. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

“Good.” Morrison took one last irritated look at the lab clone. “Nox him first, and get him onto transport.”

“Goddamnit…”

Grady searched for the words to convince them. “Wait. Don’t do this. I—”

But the irresistible urge to sleep swept over him like a suffocating blanket.

Jon Grady gazed from theedge of a thousand-foot cliff, across an endless expanse of deep water. He guessed the plunge continued straight down beneath the waves to crushing depths. Such cliffs ringed the island. An island so distant from everywhere that there were only two species of local bird—one flightless—and almost no wildlife. No rodents. No snakes. Limited plants even. Perhaps one day a migratory bird population would arrive. That might give him some indication of where he was.

At nights Grady stood in the darkness near his cottage, gazing up at a riot of stars and the cloud of the Milky Way arching overhead. It was even more glorious than he’d remembered from his years wandering the Sierra Nevada and Canadian Rockies with his parents. Those were blissfully innocent times. An escape from a childhood otherwise spent enduring therapeutic efforts to “fix” him. He credited his parents with saving him from that.

Psychosis was a mental disorder whereby a person lost contact with external reality. And to all outward appearances the young Jon Grady did not engage with reality. As a toddler he had stared in wonder at things unseen, absorbed in his own world. Thought to be suffering from severe autism, he spent most of his early years under specialized care—not uttering his first words until the age of five.

And yet those first words were a complete sentence: “I want to go home now.”

And home he went, to all appearances noticing the outside world more each day.

It wasn’t until Grady was seven years old that his mother helped him understand that other people did not perceive numbers as colors—that five was not a deep indigo, nor three a vermilion red. Likewise musical tones were not part of most people’s mathematics. Grady “heard” math as he pored through its logic. Discordant notes were immediately evident. Mathematical concepts took on specific shapes in his mind relative to one another. At times the shape and sound of math problems seemed somehow wrong. Cacophonous.

He was usually correct when he had that feeling.

All of this made him different from other children. And different meant he became a target. So from an early age mathematics was his only playmate. He formed a close relationship with the natural laws all around him.

As the only child of grammar school teachers, Grady received the best care they could afford and a loving, stable home life. But it wasn’t until age ten—after he’d undergone years of fruitless autism therapies—that he was correctly diagnosed.

Congenital synesthesia was a condition where one or more of the senses were conflated within the brain. In Grady’s case he suffered from both color and number-form synesthesia—sometimes known as grapheme—which meant he perceived numbers as colors, geometric shapes, and sounds. He saw numbers normally as well and could draw their actual outlines, but he simultaneously imbued them with more than was actually there.

The neural basis for synesthesia was imperfectly understood, but a normal brain dedicated certain regions to certain functions. The visual cortex processed image perceptions but was further subdivided into regions involved in color processing, motion processing, and visual memory. The prevailing theory was that increased cross talk between different specialized subregions of the visual cortex caused different forms of synesthesia. Thus, Jon Grady’s brain had more internal information exchange than those of most people.

The effect made him sound crazy to those who didn’t know him. About the only thing that gave Grady peace was being outdoors. Hiking and stargazing seemed to calm him more than any therapy ever had, filling his senses with wonder. And his parents resolved to give him that wonder. They sold the family home, bought a camper, and began a protracted tour of national and state parks—homeschooling Grady as they went.