Hiro had already decided to still visit her from time to time after he got his new apartment. He was imagining her face the first time he dropped by, a well-to-do stylist, when his door exploded open. It didn’t take much to knock down these shitty doors, and the cops had brought a battering ram.
In five seconds he was facedown on his bathroom floor, wondering who was going to have to pay for that door.
“I am Akihiro Sato, I am a fully legal clone and I freely offer my mindmap. It is up to date. I’ve never done anything illegal,” he said, again, to an unsmiling policeman. They hadn’t given him anything for the bump on his forehead, and his headache was getting worse.
His grandmother was ninety-five years in the grave, but he wondered if she had been reincarnated into the police detective now interrogating him.
“Mr. Sato, do you mean to tell me that you are a fully legal clone, abiding by all international clone Codicils? Every one of them?” asked the detective, a middle-aged white woman with a girlish bob haircut. Her name was Detective Natalie Lo. “No relation. Obviously,” she had said when he cheerfully asked her if she was related to the woman who ran the noodle restaurant.
Detective Lo wore on her sleeve the symbol for Gemini, the stamp of a cop that specialized in policing clone law.
“That is what I’m telling you. My files are all up to date, all you have to do is check,” he said, passing over his memory drive, which he wore on his wrist.
The clone memory drives were several terabytes’ worth of data including the clone’s latest mindmap, documents, DNA, and history. They were required to wear them at all times.
Detective Lo didn’t move to take it. “And what can you tell me about this?” she asked, pulling a file from her briefcase and passing it to Hiro.
He opened it and saw a picture of himself. In a place he had never been. Doing a thing he had never done. A very bloody, violent thing.
A hysterical voice in his head wondered if he had just tried to cut the man’s hair and ended up cutting his throat instead. And then forgotten completely about it.
There was a lot of blood in the room, over the bed, dripping onto the floor. Not a drop of blood stained this Hiro’s hands as he, over several security shots, slit a man’s throat, laid him on the bed, and left the room. The last shot had him looking directly at the camera, his eyes slightly wide as if he had just realized that he’d been watched.
“That’s not me—” The words dried in his throat as he realized they were the worst defense in the world of defenses.
“Mr. Sato, through these photographs we can ascertain a few things. Either you are lying to us and are a killer on the side to supplement your haircutting business,” she said, quirking an eyebrow. “Although if you were, I’d hope you would live in a better place than the shithole we found you in.”
“I’m not—” he started, but she interrupted him.
“Or you are an illegal clone, breaking Codicil One of the international testament.” She pulled another sheet out of her briefcase, a beaten leather deal that Hiro guessed had been an heirloom from a cop relative, and squinted at it. “It is unlawful for a person to make more than one clone of themself at a time. Cloning is to be used only for lengthening life, not multiplying it.
“Or,” she continued, finally picking up Hiro’s memory drive and holding it like it might crumble in her fingertips, “you could have a twin. Who is also a clone. But this should tell us that.”
Without looking, Detective Lo held the memory drive over her shoulder, where a short uniformed officer took it. “Mitsuki, print out the pertinent information on this, please.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Mitsuki murmured, taking the drive from the room. Hiro wondered if she was going to try to print off his entire personality and memory. There wasn’t enough paper in the world. Humans never had any idea how much data was needed to create a proper clone.
Detective Lo sat and watched Hiro as he sat miserably rubbing his head. “You’re not saying much,” she said at last.
“What is there to say?” he said. “If I deny it, you won’t believe me. If I stay silent you’ll take that as admission of guilt, but at least I won’t say anything stupid that you can use against me later.”
“Is this you?” she asked, pointing at the very-Hiro-looking man in the photo.
“No.”
“Is it a twin?”
“No.”
“Is it your illegal clone?”
“It sure seems that way,” he said. Her eyebrows shot up, and he laughed bitterly. “Oh, come on. I know what it looks like; I’m not an idiot. Did you ever think that while it does look like there’s another me out there, I may not be the one in charge of the cloning? My DNA is in several databases. You know those databases, the ones that sometimes get hacked?
“Hell, for all I know,” he added, looking at the door where the cop had left with his memory drive, “your cop is making a copy of me right now. You know I’m not supposed to allow that drive out of my sight, right? By law?”
“I’m going to need proof of your whereabouts last Wednesday night,” the detective said.
Wednesday night. He’d had three clients that night. Finding them for statements shouldn’t be a problem. “I can do that,” he said.
She handed him a tablet and stylus to write his alibis’ information down. As he was writing, she said, “You seem pretty calm for someone who could be in a lot of trouble.”
“I know I didn’t do anything. And if there’s an illegal clone out there, it’s him, not me,” he said.
“But if we catch him, one of you will be erased,” she said.
He looked up into her bland face. “I hope you’ll erase the murderer,” he said.
“The law states we have to erase the duplicate, not the criminal,” she said. “Apparently the creation of an unlawful clone is worse than the death of a normal person.” She looked at him with open dislike. “I didn’t write the rules.”
“Well, lawmakers are assholes,” he said faintly, trying to remember the name of the client with the hair he regularly dyed green. He only thought of her as the “dyed armpits lady,” but he doubted the police would be able to track her based on that.
Detective Lo shrugged. “On that, we can agree.”
She watched him for another moment, and then said, “How about the fact that something inside you can do what we just saw? Without even breaking a sweat? How do you explain that?”
“What do you mean? It wasn’t me.”
“But something in you is capable of doing that. Or they could put someone else’s personality in your body,” she suggested.
“Hackers can do a lot of things, but they can’t do that yet. Not without making you go insane.” He gestured to her arm patch. “Surely you learned that in clone hunting school?”
She smiled. “Sure. Just wondered if you knew it. Was throwing you a fake lifeline.”
“Thanks,” he said. “I’m fairly sure that clone was hacked. I wouldn’t do that.”
“We’ll see,” she said.
Three days later, face-to-face with his clone, Hiro tried to control the cold sweat breaking out on his brow.