The Mirror Man, стр. 8

in this project, had completed a medical probe unlike anything in history. It detected everything, and left Pike with an exhaustive list of every childhood illness Jeremiah had ever suffered, every metabolic imbalance, every virus, vaccination and injury. It had even picked up on the fact that Jeremiah had broken the same arm twice, once at the age of seven, and again at twenty-two. The injuries had left him with the disturbing ability to rotate his left arm several degrees farther than his right. His clone, Pike had told him, would be able to do the same thing.

“Where did ViMed get the funding to develop tech like this?” Jeremiah had asked, astonished.

“Meld is quite a profitable drug, Mr. Adams,” Pike told him. “Its release provided substantial cash flow for other avenues of research.”

“And just in time, it seems.”

“There are also some well-endowed investors behind this project. Interested parties with deep pockets,” Pike said.

After the scan, Jeremiah had been injected with experimental nanotechnology that had served as a vaccine against any further viral infections and most bacterial illnesses from that point up until the cloning. The measure ensured that he and his clone would start out medically identical in every way. The idea of microscopic robots swimming around inside him had unnerved him, but Scott had only scoffed when Jeremiah asked about it later.

“It’s perfectly harmless, Mr. Adams. If it makes you feel better, I’ve tested it on myself without adverse effect.”

It hadn’t made him feel better at all. In fact, he found it disturbing that Scott would subject himself to untested technology when he must have had a lab full of rabbits at the ready. There was so much about him that Jeremiah found disturbing, though.

It was reasonable, he supposed, in the quiet of the room, that his thoughts drifted to his family. He’d left them that morning and wouldn’t return for an entire year. He hadn’t even been able to say a proper goodbye. During his walk with Louie that morning, he’d lingered a bit longer than he usually did, allowing the dog to sniff every tree they passed and giving him an extra lap around the block. Scott had cautioned him to act normally, not to give anything away by altering his usual routine. But Jeremiah had found that almost impossible. He knew that an imposter—an inhuman copy—would be coming home in his place for dinner that night. He was leaving them in the hands of an untested science experiment. How does anyone act normally knowing that?

So, as Parker brushed by him out the door to make the school bus, Jeremiah had given his son a quick, impulsive kiss on the top of the head, a gesture so out of character that both Parker and Diana had paused and stared at him like he’d just lost his grip on reality. Jeremiah had made a show of shrugging it off. But what, he wondered now, would his clone do with that memory? They had erased the memory of why he’d done it, certainly, but Parker and Diana had seen it. Presumably, the clone would need to remember that moment in case it ever came up in conversation. The effort of wrapping his brain around that enigma wasn’t going to help his headache, he decided, and he almost welcomed the disruption of someone knocking at his front door.

Before he could get himself out of bed and into the living room, Dr. Natalie Young had already let herself in. She’d have to, he figured, since he was incapable of even opening his door from the inside.

“I wasn’t expecting you, Dr. Young.” He looked down at his shoeless feet with some apprehension.

“You have just seen the clone for the first time. I thought it might be a good idea to have a talk, Mr. Adams,” she said, and motioned for him to take a seat on one of the couches. She sat on the other, directly across from him. She crossed her legs at the ankles, adjusted her computer pad on her lap and smiled at him in a way that was at once demure and expectant.

Just like the first time he’d seen her, Jeremiah was struck by the idea that she looked more like a model playing a scientist in some rock video than she did an actual scientist. She was a beautiful woman for her age, which Jeremiah guessed was near either side of forty. The fact that she sported black-rimmed men’s eyeglasses and wore her silvery-colored hair pulled back in a tense knot behind her head was an obvious attempt to work around her looks. It almost had the opposite effect.

But Natalie Young was all business and a woman of few words, as he supposed most psychiatric doctors needed to be. She seemed to be waiting for Jeremiah to say something.

“Have you seen it?” he asked.

“I have, briefly.”

“What did you think?”

“I’m more interested in your thoughts,” she said.

“Well, they got the nose just right.”

“And everything else, I’d say.”

“Yeah, everything else. It’s strange to think that thing will be going home tonight, having dinner with my family, walking my dog.”

“How does that make you feel, Jeremiah?”

“I don’t know, nervous, I guess. But this is what I signed up for, right?” He tried to smile but he had the sense it didn’t come across right.

“Why don’t you tell me how you spent the last night with your family. What was that like?” she asked.

“It was just normal, I guess. A normal night. You know, dinner, some TV.”

“I can’t imagine it felt very normal for you,” she said. “You are literally being replaced, Jeremiah. You must have been feeling something on your last night with your wife and son. Did you do anything special? What was going through your mind?”

In fact, there had been a great deal going through his mind the night before. On his drive home, he had thought of soldiers. How many times had he seen on the evening news the syrupy stories of young men or women returning