The windowless room had three people besides her in it, her two “escorts” and a third man, all looking tall and Luna-born. They were in a computer lab adjacent to a cloning lab. Through the open door Maria could see rows and rows of green vats, about eighteen. Each had the body of the same man floating inside at various stages of growth.
Sitting at the computer terminal was a man who looked to be of Indian descent. He smiled at her. “Dr. Arena,” he said. “Please forgive your rough treatment in your travels and be welcomed to Luna. Can I get you a beverage of some sort?”
Maria stared at him. “What I’d really like is a hand massage and directions to the nearest shuttle port. Can that be arranged?”
The man nodded to the redheaded man who had escorted her in. He beamed at her, took Maria’s right hand, and began to gently massage it. His partner stood by the door, her arms crossed.
“The other request we can take care of later,” the man said. “My name is Mayur Sibal, and I am a doctor of dupliactrics here on Luna. Until recently I was head of the most prestigious cloning lab on the moon.”
Recently. Maria began to get a sinking feeling in her stomach. That’s not to say she had been optimistic about her situation, but she had held on to some hope that someone wanted a job done that she would have done anyway, had they actually asked her or something. But “recently”—that wasn’t a good sign.
“Recently” the clones had revolted on Earth, and then revolted on the moon as anti-cloning fanatics fanned the flames. Clones had disappeared and not been rewoken—assassinations, if the same rules applied to clones as they did humans. Which it looked more and more likely that they wouldn’t.
Maria didn’t say anything as she puzzled this out. Dr. Sibal waited a moment and then continued. “I have a job for you.”
“Most people who I work with are less forceful with their requests,” Maria said, raising an eyebrow. “What do you want me for?”
In answer, Dr. Sibal turned to the computer screen and pushed a button. The image of a tall, white-haired young man appeared. He knelt on the floor, muttering prayers with his hand on a book.
“You may have heard of Father Gunter Orman,” Sibal said. “A most unpleasant man, violently opposed to our cause. We have intel that he was about to endorse clone hunting. Genocide.”
Maria winced. She didn’t fear death, but being hunted…that was something altogether different. And “genocide” implied that he would also be working to ensure the clones would not to return to their bodies.
Before Maria had gone the route of illegal hacking, she had done a stint writing code to keep out hackers like her, but also hackers seeking to sabotage the precious computer backups of their personalities. She knew the threats out there were more than psychic danger.
“I’ve heard of him,” she said. She pulled her hand out of the man’s grasp—gently, so he wouldn’t think she was trying to get away—and handed him her other numb hand. He didn’t even look at her, but went to work coaxing life back into that limb.
“We got him. We were trying to bring him around to our thinking the peaceful way, and when he wouldn’t listen, we tried the non-peaceful way.”
Maria kept her face calm, determined to show them no reaction.
“Then,” Sibal continued, “we cloned him and killed the original. We hoped that having him see that we’re the same after cloning would get him on our side.”
“And that didn’t work either,” Maria guessed drily. “Else you wouldn’t need me.”
Dr. Sibal smiled and rubbed his hands together. “You are quick to learn. That’s exactly it. We need to hack his personality and remove the hatred of clones, indeed, the hatred of who he is. We are attempting to encourage him to embrace his new family and understand we are not monsters.”
Too late for that, Maria very pointedly did not say.
“And if I refuse?” she asked.
The man massaging her hand grasped her pinkie in his fist and twisted it viciously. Maria heard the snap a moment before the pain enveloped her arm. She yelled and jerked her hand back, cradling it against her chest.
“You could have just said something! I might have responded to a threat!”
Sibal had lost his thin smile. “You need to know we are serious. If you do this for us, we will let you go.”
Maria wanted to know why they would trust her to do a good job instead of putting this poor man out of his misery by destroying his mindmap, but she could guess. Her hand throbbed horribly, and she didn’t look down at her twisted left pinkie.
“Sold,” she said, hating how small her voice sounded.
It was a matter of child’s play to strip the base hatred of clones from the priest, but she wanted to look back farther and see if she could identify the triggering effect that started the hatred. Searching a personality matrix was tedious, but always a fascinating puzzle.
Her captors, however, weren’t interested in her finesse.
“My employer needs that personality ready in a week,” Dr. Sibal said, looking over her shoulder.
“If you want him to act as if he’s on your side all the time, you have to let me do my job the way I do it,” Maria said, not looking over her shoulder. “You hired me for a reason, and that probably wasn’t to do a hatchet job on this matrix. You don’t tell a brain surgeon to hurry up with the scalpel, do you?”
“When the entirety of the clone future rides on it, I do,” he said in her ear. Her back stiffened but she kept carefully searching the mindmap and making notes.
“Threats will also slow me down, Doctor,” she said.
“I don’t threaten, Ms. Arena,” he said, tapping her broken finger with maybe more force than was needed.
He left the room, but Maria had gotten the clue. Get the damn hacking done, or they take another finger, or my whole body. She had been on Luna for one week now and hadn’t done a mindmap for herself. In another week she would be counted as missing on Earth. In seven years she might be declared legally dead and woken up, wondering what the hell had happened. Unless the laws changed again.
She sat back and rubbed her eyes. She had yet to find the moment in Father Orman’s life that put in his hatred of clones. Her pinkie throbbed. It hadn’t been set, and was busy healing itself at an awkward angle. She wondered if it would have to be rebroken. If she survived this.