Steven Kent - The Clone Empire

The voice on the other end belonged to a woman. “General Harris, this is Jennifer Morman.”

“Morman?” I asked. I did not recognize the name or the voice.

“I’m the forensic psychologist you brought in from Morrowtown.”

I recognized each of the words as she spoke them, but it took a moment before I pieced them together into a coherent stream. Sitting up, I said, “Right …right. Have you had a look at the clone I brought in?”

“I’ve never seen anything quite like him,” she said.

I glanced at the clock in the console. The time was 05:28. It no longer mattered whether it was 01:00 or 10:00; it was time for me to get moving. “Have you made any progress?” I asked as I climbed out of bed and slipped into my uniform. I still had sixty minutes before I had planned to wake up.

“Oh, I’ve made progress all right,” she said. “I’ve made a lot of progress.”

I told Morman I would be right over and headed out of my billet. Gobi Station did not have a “forensic psychology” lab, so I’d stuck her in an unused office in the station’s lowest basement. Five armed guards stood outside the lab …just in case.

The guards knew me by sight. They stood at attention and let me through. Morman, on the other hand, had never seen me. She heard the door open, turned to say hello, and froze. A strange smile formed across her lips as she said, “Oh my Lord, you’re a Liberator.”

Feeling a bit awkward, I said, “Dr. Morman, I’m General Harris.”

“You are a Liberator, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am a Liberator clone. Is that going to be a problem?” Even the most open-minded people were afraid of Liberators. We were the pit bulls of the synthetic crowd.

“God, no,” she said. “It’s exciting to meet you. I thought the Liberators were extinct.”

“As far as I know, I’m the last,” I said, no longer caring whether or not she felt comfortable around me. She made me uncomfortable. I got the feeling she was dissecting me with her eyes.

“General, for a forensic psychologist like me, you are a gold mine. I’d love to sit down with you and maybe pick your brain.”

Images of Sam the coroner manhandling Sergeant Lewis still played in my head. I did not want this woman giving me the psychological equivalent of an autopsy. “We’ll see,” I said, making a mental note not to spend any unnecessary time down here.

As if she had read my thoughts, Dr. Morman nodded and became somewhat guarded. “Maybe we should stick to Sua,” she said.

“What can you tell me about him?” I asked.

“Oh well, he’s an interesting study,” she said in an all-business tone. “I don’t believe his name is Sua.”

“It’s not. We found the real Philip Sua shortly after we arrested this man. Your patient had stuffed him into a meat locker.”

“Was he all right?” Morman asked.

I pulled a Freeman and answered the question by ignoring it.

“Have you looked at Myron’s report?” she asked.

Maybe I was still tired. It took me a moment to figure out that Myron must have been the older coroner. Myron and Sam, I told myself. “I’ve spoken with his assistant,” I said.

“Okay, well, did he tell you about the low brain activity?” she asked. “I would have come to the same conclusion without Myron’s help. I mean, you don’t need to spend more than a minute with Sua to see what’s wrong with him, but the autopsy confirmed my findings. Philip Sua’s problems wouldn’t be any more obvious if he had three heads.”

Or if he was a Liberator clone, I thought as I asked, “And what exactly is his problem?”

“What are his problems? Sua’s problems are legion, General. This man has more devils in him than anyone could ever hope to exorcise.”

“I don’t understand. Are you saying he’s insane?” I thought about the bastard standing for hours in that cargo hold, hitting himself with his tablet and berating himself. A lunatic? It made sense. Maybe a sociopath, too. His kind killed easily enough. Maybe the Unified Authority had developed a strain of mass-murderer clones. “Is he psychotic?”

“Psychotic,” she said, the word lingering on her lips. She was an older woman, maybe in her forties, the first traces of gray showing in her hair. She wore glasses. She was trim and energetic, and she approached her work with this queer enthusiasm. I might have described her as a playful authority. Maybe she found irony in the notion of a Liberator clone accusing anyone else of being psychotic.

“Clinically speaking, he is not psychotic. He hasn’t lost contact with reality,” she said. “Sua’s problems are more along the lines of neurosis than psychosis. I mean, he does have an induced physical condition, but his behavior is clearly neurotic.”

She must have thought I knew more about forensic psychology than I did. I knew a few psychological terms, but Marines used those terms as pseudoobscenities not diagnosis. When an officer goes out of control, we may report him as a “loose cannon,” but in private conversation we’d refer to him as a “psychotic bastard.”

“What do you mean by neurotic?” I asked.

In answer, she winked, and said, “Let’s go have a word with Mr. Sua, shall we?” She led me through the door at the back of the office into the area that had become her makeshift lab. The only furniture in her lab was a desk, a few stools, and three long-necked floor lamps bunched close together like a trio of storks.

In the center of the room, Philip Sua lay on the contraption that law-enforcement professionals referred to as an “incapacitation cage.” The cage did not rely on anything as primitive as bars or straps or clamps. If Sua managed to sit up, he could have walked right out of the laboratory. The problem was, his muscles weren’t listening to his brain.

He lay on a table with two diodes a pin’s breadth away from the nape of his neck. Metal filaments inserted into the base of his skull channeled the steady stream of electricity running between those diodes through his spine, rendering his body helpless from the neck down. He could not turn his head or uncurl his fingers.

Sua lay conscious on the table, watching us as we entered the room. His eyes switched back and forth between us; but he did not speak. If I expected a psychotic madman with a confident grin and dangerous eyes, that was not what I found. Sua looked nervous.

“Can he speak?” I asked.

“Oh yes, see, hear, speak …everything but move. He’s been very cooperative,” Morman said.

I stepped closer to the cage. I did not hear the crackle of electricity or feel a tingle on my skin. The current running through Sua’s body was a mere trickle. “Hello, Sua,” I said.

Dr. Morman introduced me as well. “Philip, this is General Harris.”

“We’ve met,” he said, his brown eyes on my face but never quite meeting my gaze.

I was glad to see two MPs standing in the far corner of the lab with guns on their belts. Despite her ghoulish fascination with Liberators, I liked Dr. Morman. She struck me as smart and competent, but also as a delicate woman playing with forces far more dangerous than she understood.

That thought reminded me of the question that had been nagging me since we arrested Sua. Still watching the captive clone, I said, “Doctor, I’ve run into two of these clones so far. There is the tissue donor down at the morgue, then there is Sua.

“The one in the morgue wouldn’t give up. He was coughing up blood, and we still had to shoot him.

“Then there is Sua. He gave up without a fight.”

Morman had her answer ready. What she said made me forget all about sand, syringes, and bowls. Her answers were far more enlightening. Once she explained herself, everything fell into place.