“Then you hold it. I am obliged to prevent harm from coming to your sister,” said Felicity. “No one said anything about you.”
“I see,” he said. “Well, then, this is the sitting room.” He gestured around at the room they were currently occupying. “You may be familiar with it, since you’ve already been in here for quite a few minutes.”
“Yes,” said Felicity, “but I haven’t taken a close look.” It really was a beautiful place, large, bright, and modern. There was a dining area with a polished table large enough to host a fairly big dinner party. The sofas were plush, the sort you could sink into for a good long hibernation. An enormous television was attempting to hang discreetly on the wall and failing miserably. Glamorous coffee-table books lay artfully displayed on glossy coffee tables. You felt more sophisticated just for being in the room.
The current occupants had added a few touches, however, which detracted a little from the fashion-shoot vibe of the place. Distinctly unglamorous copies of anatomical textbooks, bristling with bookmarks, lay splayed amongst the (seemingly aghast) coffee-table books. There were partially filled-out government forms on the dining table. A small fern in a pot trailed tendrils of green and glittering copper. And on a sideboard stood a large clear plastic box containing a thick layer of wood shavings and a pair of flamboyantly patterned...
“Mice,” said Felicity.
“Those are mine,” said Alessio.
“I didn’t think that a hotel would let you bring pets,” said Felicity. “My dog is with a sitter.”
“I told them that these were my seeing-eye mice.”
“What?” asked Felicity, looking at him.
“Not really,” said Alessio. “And they’re not pets, they’re part of my studies.”
“How did you get them into the suite?”
“They’re mice,” said the boy. “It’s not like I had to smuggle in a pair of aardvarks. And besides, in a hotel this expensive, they’re used to privileged guests bringing their pets. If it’s not some celebutante with her Chihuahua, it’s a movie star with his angora goat or a pop musician with a large man on a leash.”
“All right, so what are their names?” asked Felicity. She was trying not to be intimidated by the fact that the kid was obviously much more familiar with a life of luxury than she was. She peered down at the rodents, which were extremely peculiar-looking. Their left sides were pure glossy black while their right sides were a flat, spotless white. The line that divided the colors could have been drawn with a ruler. Their right eyes were red, their left eyes black. Apart from their chromatic bisection, they appeared to be perfectly normal and were engaged in the traditional mouse activities of wandering around and squeaking.
“They’re Mouse A, and Mouse A(i),” said Alessio, somehow managing to convey through speech the presence of parentheses and a lowercase Roman numeral one.
“Catchy. Explain.”
“Mouse A is the latest in a long line of mice that has been bred by the Broederschap. They’re designed to be highly distinctive in appearance.”
“And what do they do?”
“The mice? You’re looking at it. They run around, they squeak. They’re mice. But Mouse A(i) is one of my assignments,” said Alessio. “I’ve grown him as a clone of Mouse A. He’s a copy.”
“You copied a mouse?” said Felicity.
“Good, isn’t it?”
“How?” asked Felicity, unable to take her eyes off the Grafter-mice. She kept expecting them to extrude talons and antlers, break through the plastic of their enclosure, and scuttle off in search of cheese and human blood.
“Do you have any knowledge of microbiology and cellular formatting?”
“No.”
“Are you interested in learning about them?”
“God, no,” said Felicity.
“In that case, I took some mouse blood, put it in a tub of magic Grafter-slime, added some starch, and a new mouse grew out of it,” said Alessio.
“How do you know which mouse is which?” asked Felicity.
“At the moment, I don’t,” said Alessio in a satisfied tone. “Not by looking. No one does. Mouse A(i) is a perfect copy.”
“So, could you copy a human being?” said Felicity.
“Yeah,” said Alessio. “I mean, I couldn’t, but the Broederschap could.” She looked at him questioningly. “That description about the slime and the starch, that was a drastic simplification. Mouse A(i) has taken me months of work. A person would be a lot more difficult to make. And, yes, you can make a copy of a person, but you can’t make a copy of memories. Mouse A(i) started out as a fetus, then grew into a baby mouse, and then grew into what you see today. Four months ago, you could have easily told the difference between the two, just by size.”
“So, you could make a fetus that would grow into an identical copy of a person?”
“Genetically identical,” said Alessio. “But we don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Um, because why would we? Odette says that anyone who wants a clone of himself is the last person you would want more of.”
“So I’m not going to wake up and see a Stepford me standing over me with a blank expression and a knife?” said Felicity.
“Like an adult? No,” he said definitely. “I mean, we can speed-grow a clone to be an adult, it’s an extrapolation of Podsnap’s Technique, but it still doesn’t have any memories. It’s like a fetus. I think a Stepford you would stare at you with a blank expression and then fall over because it hadn’t learned how to stand yet.” Felicity nodded, still entranced by the identical mice.
“Show me the rest of the suite,” she said finally.
“There’s the other bedroom,” said Alessio. “Which I suppose is mine now.” The other bedroom proved to be a little bit larger than hers, with a gigantic bed and various artsy bits of furniture. There was also a goodly amount of expensive-looking luggage lined up against the wall. Felicity examined it enviously. Then with incredulity. Then with a mild sense of horror.
“I didn’t know Louis Vuitton made a biological-specimen quarantine case,” she said faintly.
“I think it’s bespoke,” said Alessio. The room had its own little fridge tucked away in a cupboard, but when Felicity opened it, it contained none of the standard minifridge drinks. Instead, it held some decidedly nonstandard minifridge vacuum flasks that were, she noted, each monogrammed with an ornate O and L. Well, I won’t grab anything to drink out of here. There were also some hypodermic needles in sterile plastic wrappers.
In front of the window, there was a desk with a laptop, a few notebooks, and some large leather-bound books that looked incredibly technical and tedious. There was also a series of framed photos that caught Felicity’s eye since they clearly belonged to Odette and not the hotel. She moved closer.
The first was a picture of Odette and Alessio with two pleasant-looking people who were obviously their parents. One showed a West Highland terrier smiling from a pile of golden leaves. And there were lots of pictures of Odette with a group of six people her own age.
“Who are they?”
“Those are Odette’s friends,” said Alessio quietly. He came up beside her.
“They’re all Grafters?”
“Yeah, they all studied together,” explained Alessio.
From the look of the photos, that wasn’t all they did together. Every photo seemed to have been taken in some glorious location. In one picture, they were all dressed in ski clothes and goggles, and the Alps reared behind them. In another, they were underwater, their mouths drawn open in grinning subaqueous roars. One of the pictures showed them having dinner in a restaurant, holding up enormous steins of beer in a toast to the camera. And then there was a night shot of them clinging to a jagged stone sculpture atop a horrendously steep roof, the lights of a city far behind and below them. It had clearly been taken at arm’s length by one of the men, who was reaching out to the edge of the picture.