The Mirror Man, стр. 48

“I’d like to do another session with the Meld in a week or so, just to keep up with what you’re feeling,” she said. “But let’s call it a day for now. You look like you could use some rest.”

Rest was the last thing Jeremiah got over the next several days. Every time he tried to sleep his mind would spin in fifteen different ways. He now knew, without a doubt, exactly how far Charles Scott and the people working with him would go to save this project. And somewhere in the back of his mind he wondered what role Meld had played in all of it. Was it the drug that had made his mother so confused? Was that what made her question the clone? His own role in bringing it to the public, in assuring the world it was perfectly safe, was eating at him. There was blood on his hands, he realized. He was complicit in every single death, including that of his own mother.

Underneath it all, Jeremiah worried about what he might have revealed to Natalie through the Meld. Did she sense his suspicion? His memory of what happened under the drug was, as usual, foggy at best. He couldn’t be certain about what she’d seen, about how well he’d managed to control his own thoughts. And the prospect of taking the Meld with her again was looming. He couldn’t let her see what he knew about Scott. He had to hide what he knew about the greater scope of the project. He couldn’t afford to rouse her suspicion.

And he was still fixated on the notion that he had to keep Louie a secret, too. As he watched the clone every day, infiltrating and taking over every aspect of his life, it was his dog’s loyalty that somehow kept him tethered. He needed it more than he thought was logical, but with everything that had happened, it seemed like all he had left.

No matter what that clone did to coax and cajole him, Louie wanted nothing to do with him. There was no aggression anymore—the medicine had seen to that—but there was a stubborn reluctance that could not be broken, and Jeremiah delighted in that. It felt like some sort of small victory. And it gave him some inexplicable gratification to know that Charles Scott’s grand experiment wasn’t as infallible as he probably thought it was. Every morning the clone would attempt, and every morning he would fail, to lure Louie onto the leash. Finally, he’d just give up and wake Parker to walk him before school, which never went over well.

“You know, it’s been scientifically proven that teenagers need more sleep than adults,” Parker informed the clone. “What the hell did you do to make this dog hate you, Dad? Kick him or something?”

Keeping that secret—just one small thing that he could be certain belonged, securely, to him—was becoming increasingly important to him. As Jeremiah obsessed on it, that knowledge almost came to signify his last remnant of personal self under this microscope. He wasn’t going to give it away.

So, some nights, when he couldn’t sleep, he’d find himself at the computer, searching for a way to control his own thoughts, even under the influence of Meld. In the dim glow of the monitor, he’d fuel himself on French roast and study articles on self-hypnosis, meditation and astral projection. He’d sit in the dark and practice sending his consciousness in willful directions until he realized the futility of it. He didn’t believe in any of this.

He’d usually end up trying to exhaust himself with an hour on the treadmill, staring blankly at vistas as dull as he could think to program into the monitor—an empty suburban street, a high school parking lot, a construction site left padlocked and vacant overnight. And if all else failed, he’d finally settle on the couch, put on the headset and play IF, blowing things up in satisfying blasts of virtual obliteration, not caring who was watching or what they might have thought. In time, all that practice gave Jeremiah enough confidence to challenge Brent outright.

“You really think you can take me?” Brent said after a particularly dull weekday afternoon viewing. “You’re on.” He opened two beers and took a seat on the couch.

“I’ve made a few adjustments,” Jeremiah told him. He turned on the game and donned his headset, and his avatar appeared on the wall in all his menacing glory. “Meet Clyde,” he said.

“Whoa, you have been busy. He looks pretty tough.”

“Indeed. He’s a mercenary for hire. Kills first, asks questions later. He’s a Gulf War vet, watched his CO get blown to bits in front of him and then ate lunch. Came back from combat a little whacked out and his wife left him six months later. Took his baby girl. Ever since, the only thing keeping the demons away is a little more action. He never says no to a job.”

“Jesus, Jeremiah,” Brent said with a smirk. “Does he have a favorite color, too?”

“What’s wrong with a little backstory? Gives him substance, I think. It makes him seem more real.”

“Yeah,” Brent told him, wide-eyed. “Except he’s not real. He’s made of pixels and photons. And maybe a little bit of crazy.”

Jeremiah just shrugged and started shooting.

“Hey,” Brent said after they’d gone a few rounds, “you want to really test Clyde out?”

“Yeah. Start shooting.”

“No, not with me, I mean with someone else.”

“In case you haven’t noticed,” Jeremiah said, “you and I are the only ones here. You want me to call Scott? Challenge him to a game? Maybe get a pizza?”

Brent smirked. “I accessed the beta platform. Been playing with this guy who’s pretty good. Better than me, honestly. I still can’t beat him.”

“Do you really think it’s a wise move to take a risk like that? So you can play a game?”

“I know what I’m doing,” he said. “I’m not a complete idiot. Besides, I think Scott and the rest of