“I know. But for whatever reason you do do it, I appreciate your support.” Considered all I’d seen. “Paris wasn’t ‘there.’ Nowhere that looked like France was.”
Algar shot me a very innocent smile.
“Huh. You don’t want me wasting time on Cliff’s lame ‘go capture Stephanie’ clue. Why not? Siler’s pretty much confirmed that she’s there.”
“Benjamin is rarely wrong, and he’s not wrong now. However, I know you know how to prioritize.”
“Yeah, well, stopping the bad guys feels like a priority. And you know I’m going to have to hit Paris, London, Sydney, and any number of other major cities.”
Algar sighed. “You asked for help. I give it to you, and you discount and ignore it.”
He had a point. Pondered it while I looked through the rest of the bookmarked pages. Most of them related to the area in the Middle East that the atlas had been opened to. Clearly Algar felt that a lot of action was going to take place in this area.
Thought some more. “The triangular areas are actually landing sites, right?”
“So Muddy told you, yes.”
“I’m asking for your confirmation, please and thank you.”
“Fine. Yes.”
“Wow. A straight answer. I may faint. Later, when there’s time for it.”
Actively chose not to mention that he was being far less obscure in his helpful hints than normal—why push my luck? Also actively chose not to wonder if Algar was being more clearly helpful than usual because what was coming was so horrendous that he felt he had to give us more of a fighting chance, mostly because I had a horrible feeling that this was indeed his reason for being a Helpy Helper.
Instead, ran over everything that had happened so far during the Kitty’s Current Big Day Show. “What was Casey, the Casey in the police department, the thing that blew up? Android, robot, something else?”
“Ah, and now you ask the right question.” Algar sounded pleased but in no way ready to actually, you know, answer the right question.
Resisted the urge to sigh and roll my eyes. “Okay, so she’s the key to whatever it is you want me focused on, right?”
Algar nodded.
“Argh, you’re killing me, Smalls. Okay, so there has to be something significant or off or extra-weird about her or you wouldn’t be having so much fun with this. So, lemme ponder some more, since I know you love making me work for it.”
“This is how you learn.”
“Thanks, Professor Algar.” Considered why Casey had looked so bad. “So, here’s a thought. Androids are so well made they can pass for humans, both externally and emotionally. But Casey looked flat-out awful. We stopped Stephanie’s androidization of Joe and Randy mid-process. They’re changed internally, but they still look the same.”
“And?” Algar asked leadingly.
“And that means that Casey wasn’t an android, unless said android was made to look awful, and I kind of doubt it. Though, it’s a great excuse for why she wanted to ‘turn’ on Cliff.”
“Go on.”
“Okay, Fem-Bots are made, currently, to look like specific people. And neither Cliff nor Stephanie are involved in their creation or manufacture. Or, rather, if the Mastermind Complex started the Fem-Bots, someone else finished them. Meaning that Casey was not a Fem-Bot gone wrong.”
Received yet another nod. Once again had to actively choose not to make a smartass comment. Just tried to channel Chuckie and look at this as a cool way of exercising my mind.
“Therefore we can rule out Casey being a Fem-Bot, and she probably wasn’t an android, either. But she smelled human, or human enough, to the dogs, and she didn’t register as non-human to Tito’s tests, though she did register as ‘off.’ Sure, he didn’t use the OVS, but Tito made a point of saying that she registered as distinctly different from any android or Fem-Bot we’ve seen.”
“And?” Algar was definitely in Teacher Mode. Lucky me.
Focused back on things that had bothered me about Casey at the police station. And thought about what I knew about her. “I can’t believe that Casey signed on for a suicide mission. I mean, seriously, she’s a survivor. And I also can’t believe that Cliff did some weird test on her and then let her go. The testing as punishment I could believe, but not that they allowed her to escape. Them allowing her to escape I could believe if she didn’t know she was wired to explode. But it was clear that she did.”
“What else was unusual about her or the situation?”
“She looked awful, and it was real, not makeup. Whatever was done to her was a real thing.”
“So, what might all that mean?” Algar asked.
“Will you answer a question first?”
“If you insist.”
“I really do, because I can’t answer the Big Question without this confirmation. Was whatever that Casey Thing was sent to us by Cliff and/or someone acting on his direction?”
Algar shook his head. “The things you waste your specific questions on amaze me.”
“Amaze me and give me the answer, please and thank you.”
“Yes.”
It was amazing what some simple confirmations could do, though, regardless of whether or not Algar approved of my specific questions.
“I know what that Casey Thing was.”
CHAPTER 43
ALGAR COCKED HIS HEAD at me. “And just what was she?”
“Please tell me if I’m wrong, but I think she’s a clone. A badly done clone, but a clone nonetheless.”
“Why do you think that?”
Well, it wasn’t a flat-out “you’re wrong” so held onto the idea that I was right. “Because the Mastermind Collective has perfected cloning. Or, at least, they had perfected it. I know we destroyed their main cloning facility during Operation Infiltration, and we also stole all their manuals. Maybe Cliff’s brilliant enough to have all that memorized, but I’d wager that LaRue added at least fifty percent of whatever the process was, and I don’t think the LaRue Clone is going to be as on the ball as the Original Model. Based on The Clarence Clone and Ronaldo Two-Point-O, the clones have a strong degradation from copy to copy, at least the ones hastily created do. And these days, I’m betting every clone has been hastily made, whether due to lack of proper equipment or a safe place to complete the cloning process.”
“What do you perceive as wrong with those two clones?”
“TCC is simple. Not stupid, but he wasn’t given the memory dump. Two-Point-O got memories, which is why he’s a better cloned version. But he wasn’t given enough, in that sense, because he knew the memories weren’t his own and so rejected them. But Casey seemed like Casey, only she looked horrible.”
“How well do you know Casey?”
“Not well at all. Okay, all she had to be was unpleasant and spout whatever Cliff told her to and I’d believe it was her. Cliff knows us well—far better than Stephanie does, in that sense—and he has our playbook memorized.”
“Well done.”
“So, I’m right? She was a clone?”