His clone just watched disdainfully. Why wasn’t he as upset by this as Hiro was? Facing yourself was something that wasn’t supposed to happen to a clone.
Clones don’t usually see their own dead bodies, and if they do, well, they’re dead. Not walking around, supposedly killing other people. Once they die, their old bodies are called shells and disposed of like trash.
Hiro had thought it would be like looking in a mirror, but this man in front of him, with the clean haircut, the stronger body, and the sardonic smile, screamed I am the superior, dominant, real Akihiro Sato.
They were alone in the room, but Hiro knew they were being recorded. He supposed the illusion of privacy was enough.
The woman with the dyed armpits’ name had been Auzuma Tanaka. She had given him an alibi and a sinking feeling in his stomach when she said she’d seen him on the subway just an hour before the police came by.
His clone had been caught the next morning.
“I am Akihiro Sato, the third of this line,” Hiro said.
The clone laughed. “No, you’re not. You’re seventh, at least.”
Hiro recognized the humor. Where he used his as a defense, this version of him had learned to use it as a weapon. He refused to rise. “What is your name?”
“I am Akihiro Sato, the ninth of the line.”
Hiro rubbed his ear. “Then who are all the others?”
Ninth grinned. “The others are dead except for Eight, who’s getting the rest of the mission done. The mission that you started.”
“No,” Hiro said. “I don’t know what you’re—” He glanced up at the cameras and his spine went cold.
“Come on, Seven, you’re the straight man, you provide the alibis while Eight and I get the work done. Don’t pretend, you can’t get out of it now that we’re caught. Once they catch Eight, then you and he will be erased and I’ll probably go to jail. But that’s all right. The mission is nearly done.”
“What mission?” Hiro cried. “I am Third, I remember my first life, I was born in Tokyo, I lived for sixty-eight years, I learned tailoring from my father”—Ninth began to laugh at this point, but Hiro continued desperately—“and in my second life I was a journalist and a fiction writer, but I died before I finished my first novel. I was shot in the Tokyo clone uprising. It’s in my memory drive, all of it!”
This last sentence was pleaded to the cameras. His life had been dutifully logged and recorded: He was an unimpressive man who had been curious about cloning, and figured that immortality might make him braver and more willing to take risks. Since he covered gardening and weather for the district news, the ambition he had craved had not blossomed. His memories of his mother and father, of his first love as a human, and then his loves as a clone—they were all etched clearly into his mind.
Nausea grabbed at him again, and he heard a click as a speaker turned on. Detective Lo’s voice came over, clear and strong. “Mr. Sato, Third, we have caught another clone that claims to be you. He gives his number as Eighth.”
Akihiro Sato, ninth of the line, spread his hands and smiled. “And now the mission is done.”
Hiro stayed in jail for three weeks while Detective Lo did her investigation. He asked for a blank book and pen, and once they determined he wasn’t suicidal, they gave him one.
He began meticulously writing his memories. They came clearly and obviously, his parents, his sisters, his happy life in Tokyo, time in school, dropping out of school, witnessing the clone riots, cutting the hair of clone activists, learning more about immortality. He wanted it.
Hiro’s second life was short and brutal, ending in losing his money in bad investments and dying in the second clone uprising.
The memories were clear, so clear.
Aki-HIRO!
Her voice cut through his memory again, and he hunched his shoulders instinctively. Grandmother. She had raised him, beaten him, and tried to “make him a man.” He had run away at sixteen and gone to live with a couple in a small apartment in Tokyo. From there he had learned cosmetology from a drug-addicted madam. He’d also learned about sexually transmitted diseases.
Hiro put down his pen and rubbed his forehead. Two memories, very different, wrestled for control of his head. He remembered his parents as clearly as if he were watching a television show, but he could feel the belt on his bare legs, and knew that the memories of his grandmother were real.
He dropped the book and called for Detective Lo.
Lo handed him a half-full stoneware mug of tea. He had been shaking so badly that he had spilled the first paper cup of tea and burned his hand. The heavier mug helped him control the tremors, and he sipped the sweet heat and took a deep breath.
The detective hadn’t had anyone clean up the tea he had spilled earlier. A cynical voice in Hiro’s head wondered if that was some kind of psychological game. He wasn’t entirely sure it was his voice.
Lo was sitting back in her chair, reading his journal while he drank. She flipped through to check something on a previous page, and then put it down. She removed her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose.
“Either you’re a masterful fiction writer or you’re in big trouble,” she said at last.
“I was a failure as a fiction writer,” he said dully. “Second time around. Remember?”
She pointed to the journal on the table, placed carefully away from the tea puddle. “Makes sense. That’s not actually any sort of story structure I’ve ever read before, so I wouldn’t quit your day job.” She paused, then said, “But you don’t know what your day job is, do you?”
Hiro stared at her blankly. “But that can’t be. Hackers aren’t that sophisticated, are they?”
“The underground hackers have gotten better. They used to have several restrictions on them. Now there is one restriction: Don’t do it. This has actually freed them up to do whatever they like. They can invent a powerful memory and the brain fills in the blanks, as our brains do when we only remember half of an event.”
“I don’t even know who I am, then,” Hiro said, staring into his mug.
“You are a unique kind of victim, Mr. Sato,” Detective Lo said.
Hiro looked up, and she smiled, not unkindly. “This is not me letting you go, understand. The law doesn’t let me do that. But I’m starting to believe you didn’t have much to do with the crimes here. It’s not just because you seem to be a soon-to-be erased clone, if the other two were woken after you. It’s apparent that whoever has the matrix of Akihiro Sato has created several of you, and then merged the mindmaps of more than one into a later, single clone. You have the mindmaps of at least two of your clones that lived at the same time. It’s really fascinating once you think about it, figuring how your different clones acted under different nurturing environments.”