“It’s fascinating until you live it yourself!” Hiro said, feeling hysterical laughter bubbling up. “I am remembering terrible things, things I haven’t let myself think about. I thought they were nightmares, but now—it was me. Somehow I was conditioned to do—terrible things,” he repeated, not wanting to elaborate. He was in enough trouble.
“Tell me of the things,” Lo said, leaning forward.
“Murder. Torture. And I sometimes used a knife. But I preferred unarmed.” He stared at his clean hands. “Surely this has come up before, right? Multiple clones, some committing crimes, the rights of each in question? I can’t be the first.”
“You may be the first on record who is unaware that he has been duplicated against his will,” Lo said. “We’ve looked at the mindmaps of your clones, Hiro. They are confirmed to be younger than you. You are essentially without any rights right now. We could legally euthanize you.”
Hiro felt the tea threaten to come back up. He had never considered this aspect of the clone laws. “Then would you take my mindmap? Would you bring me back?”
“That’s not for me to decide,” Lo said. “This seems to be a very strange loophole that could be abused. We could kill you and the other spare, clone a new you, and then have the right to euthanize the killer for the crimes committed. That seems wrong. And what to do with all of the mindmaps?”
Hiro looked at his hands, remembering the things they had done, choking people, rooting around in open wounds to hear the screams, taking eyes. “I don’t want their memories. I have enough already pushed on me.” He rubbed his ear and finally met her eyes. “Why do you believe me, anyway? I thought you were supposed to be skeptical of everything I say?”
She shrugged. “Gut reaction. Your story checks out. Your mindmap is all over the place; clearly you’ve had some serious hacking. Duplication is there, making a huge mess. But I’m not the one who has the ultimate decision, you know. This is already way bigger than my desk. Still, I want to believe you. Anyway, if you were lying, you would probably try to lie your way to be the newest clone, not the first one on the chopping block.”
Hiro winced.
“So I’m on your side as much as I can be. But even if you’re a bona fide saint, you are still an older clone with no legal rights. And I can’t change that.”
Detective Lo tried to bring in a clone psychologist, a judge, and the manager of the clone lab for each of the Hiros. The problem was, no one could find the manager of any of the labs Hiro had information on. Two of them no longer existed, apparently. While the labs’ digital stamp was supposed to be set in the clone’s mindmap, none of the Hiros had any of the required data.
“I told you that you’d been hacked,” Lo said, fuming.
Hiro was still in a cell, but now it was called “protective custody” because he’d been given whatever comfort he had asked for in exchange for his cooperation.
Any comfort except for freedom. Or telling any of his friends where he was.
Hiro didn’t look at her as she paced inside his cell.
“They’re calling it yadokari, the act of putting something inside someone’s brain to live there, like a hermit crab. Clever bullshit.”
He stared at the ceiling and kept trying to figure out which memories were his, the Hiro that had gone in a straight line. The good one. But he hadn’t gone in a straight line, had he? Somewhere he had split into at least two different Hiros with two different lives. One of them was what he had thought of as his memories, everything he remembered from childhood, and the other was what he had thought of as dreams.
“One will be dominant,” he said out loud.
“What?” Lo asked. Her footfalls ceased.
“I’ve had two clones’ worth of memories in my head for all my current life. It never bothered me before because I just assumed that one set was my memories, and pushed the rest to the side as dreams I once had. It wasn’t until all this started that I realized those are real memories. But I chose which one was dominant.”
“Have you talked to the psychologist about this?” she asked.
“No, I just thought of it,” he said, still staring.
She sat down at the chair opposite his bed, a comfortable place where he liked to read the books she brought him. “Hiro, in studying your case the judge has found another law that almost never has to be enforced. A clone’s consciousness can’t be abandoned.”
“What do you mean?”
“We can’t just get rid of the spare Hiros. When the three of you are dead, the newest Hiro clone will have to have all three personalities. I mean legally you’re all Akihiro Sato. If one of you dies, and we don’t mindmap that one and put him into the new Hiro, that’s murder by clone law.”
“What is that supposed to prevent?”
“If a clone disappears, either by their own actions or by someone kidnapping them, we can’t ever clone that person because we’ve lost their most recent consciousness. We can’t wake a ‘do-over,’ as it were. That might accidentally create a duplicate. That’s what the law was created for, but it fits your situation too.”
Hiro swallowed as the realization came upon him. “So…the answer is to—”
“The judge isn’t sympathetic to you. Your other clones have caused a lot of havoc recently.”
“What did they do?”
“There were major diplomatic events, the murder of several ambassadors,” she said. “The effects of which have international repercussions. It’s damaged the treaties we have with other nations. We don’t think it’s going to go as far as war, but we are in a lot of trouble with some allies.”
Hiro let out his breath in shock. “They’re going to do away with all of us, aren’t they?”
“The other clones have to be punished for their crimes. And while you’re not legally a person, you are blameless. So they want to put all of you into one body and try you that way, since you are still the same person.”
Hiro didn’t answer. He didn’t answer anything else she said to him that day. He stayed on his cot, staring at the ceiling, until lights-out. Then he stared at the darkness.
The next day, he signed the legal document stating he was an illegal spare clone and he was submitting to euthanasia.
He didn’t ask how Lo got the other two—the yadokari, as he thought of them—to consent to it. He figured he would know soon enough.
Wake Three:
Hiro
Maria saw the attack coming. She wouldn’t admit this to anyone, but she doubted she’d have to.
Besides, that wasn’t her immediate problem.
She knew about yadokari, although she hadn’t thought about them in a while. Going beyond the minor hacking of mindmaps, it was the actual implantation of something completely new in someone’s mind. Very few hackers could do it; even fewer could do it well. Maria remembered hearing about botched jobs, called hatchet jobs, which ruined someone’s mind forever.
A yadokari. It was the reason why he had lunged for her when she pressed him. Like throwing chum to sharks.