Orman had been a devout Catholic. Faith had a special color that tinged experiences. Maria was no longer religious—clones weren’t welcome in many churches, but many kept the rituals of their childhood—but she had seen enough mindmaps to distinguish the true faithful from those going through the motions out of habit, fear, or greed. Father Orman was the real deal. The light green of faith was all over his mindmap, sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker. His faith when he was kidnapped was being tested, he had felt.
She had stopped feeling guilty about reading personal mindmaps a long time ago. It was like looking at people in the bathroom: Everyone was horrified at the thought of someone seeing them on the can, and yet almost no one got any thrill looking at that. If you had to watch someone on the can, it was probably for an important reason and the fact that they were there on the can was a side issue. Maria no longer judged the little sins, the thefts, the lies, and the little hurts that didn’t amount to anything in the long run of anyone’s life. She held a lot of power here; she wasn’t going to misuse it.
The next day, Dr. Sibal had his redheaded goon break her foot. He gave her strong painkillers so she could code, and the pain receded into a distant bother, the code becoming gently drifting data that was sometimes hard to hold down.
The problem with coding while stoned, Maria mused in a distant, observant way, was that all of the ethics she held on to seemed unimportant. This priest hated clones. He thought it was okay to kill people like her. Why not just hatchet out the hate and see what they were left with?
Well, the other part of her mind countered, she might get more broken bones if she did that. If he took her thumbs she would be in trouble.
Wait a moment. There. If you were good enough, you could follow the colors of the matrix like a literal map, finding connections of emotion to memories. They were hard to identify, more advanced than simply translating numbers and letters into the intricacies of the human mind. She did a search through the priest’s childhood, looking to see if she could link his faith with his dislike of clones.
Devout faith, deeply held belief in the glory of the Creator. Absolute disgust that anyone would want to step into His shoes.
Kill the Creator. Bingo.
They didn’t let Maria go, but they were kind enough to kill her quickly and send the body back to an Earth cloning facility so that she could wake up in a new clone with no memory of her Luna adventure. She was vaguely disquieted by the missing weeks. The cloning facility didn’t tell her how she had died, just that they had received the body, so she soon went back to her life.
Thus Maria was taken completely by surprise when, five years later, she was kidnapped and shipped to the moon.
January 3, 2287
“Dr. Arena, good to see you again,” Dr. Sibal said, sitting in a rolling lab chair. Maria on a wooden chair by the door, two large people flanking her.
Maria frowned. “Again?”
“We met before your last clone’s life ended. Regrettably, you didn’t get a chance to make a mindmap to remember me.”
Maria ran her hand through her hair. “Shit, you did that?”
He nodded once. “I needed you to do a job for me that was below the legal radar, as it were.”
“Everything I do is under the legal radar!” Maria said, looking around her and wondering if she had ever been in this room before, this sterile lab. “None of my other clients felt the need to kidnap me to hire me.”
“You did a fascinating job the first time we hired you,” Dr. Sibal said. “We got almost everything we wanted.”
“I was gone for a lot of the worldwide and Luna riots,” Maria said. She had studied the news from the missing weeks of her last life to see if she could figure out what had happened to her.
Realization dawned as she remembered the news from that time. “Ah, shit,” she added, covering her face with her hands. She lifted them and peeked out, as if the sun were shining. “That was me, wasn’t it? The job on the priest who came out pro-clone. Ensured the Codicils would pass. All me.”
“You did do some excellent work on Father Orman,” he said, steepling his fingers.
“I heard he fled the moon and your faction’s control,” Maria said. “Doesn’t sound like he was on your side even after whatever I did to him.”
Dr. Sibal waved his hand as if nothing mattered. “We got what we wanted.”
“What the hell are you talking about? There are more laws restricting clones than ever!”
“We have been named more than human,” Dr. Sibal said, leaning forward in his chair. “We are not bound by human laws. This allows for the next part of the plan.”
“You wanted these laws that outlawed hacking and all that?”
“It’s a step to a brighter future,” Sibal said. “Now, to your current job.”
Maria stood up. “No, I am not helping you out anymore. You make it harder for the rest of us.”
Two heavy hands came onto her shoulders and forced her back into the chair.
“You don’t have much of a choice,” Dr. Sibal said mildly. “We need a good hacker in our employ.”
Maria hated this feeling, that she should remember this man who clearly remembered her. That she should be able to figure a way off the moon—although the fact that she was here illegally might make it difficult to get back home. Shit.
She also hated the feeling of being forced into a job. But she didn’t have much of a choice. Sibal looked like he wouldn’t kill a fly, but he would hire someone to do so.
“What would I have to do?”
“I need a hatchet.”
Some of the less-than-ethical experiments done on clones had included the hatchets. A lab wanted to know if it could create sociopaths or psychopaths by cutting out whole parts of a personality, such as empathy, sympathy, and any memory of having loved or been loved. The shells that came out the other end were beyond the scientist’s expectations, and four of them had died before security could put the clones down.
The term hatchet referred to both the job done on the clone’s matrix and the fact that the clone had become a weapon when it was woken up.
Some had tried to give the procedure a sexier name. Both katana and morningstar were tried out, but neither stuck. Despite what you wanted to think of the clone as a weapon, there was nothing pretty about taking a hatchet to a person’s matrix.
“I won’t—” Maria started to say, and a fist slammed into her jaw. Actually a large shape stepped in front of her and punched her, but she only registered the fist itself for the next thirty seconds or so.
“You tried this last time, Dr. Arena,” Dr. Sibal said. “I will have you know that we broke you then, and we can break you now.”
“You killed me last time, didn’t you?” she asked.
“Yes, but only after we broke you to do our work for us.”
She raised her head and worked her jaw to make sure it wasn’t broken. She struggled to find bravado where there was only cold fear. “Don’t, please,” she said. “Who is it?”