Outside Orson’s lab, I peeked in the dark windows to where the cases glowed with faint blue light. I tried the back door, but it didn’t open. I peered in the glass pane of the door, and then leaned back, squinting up toward the gingerbread part of the building where I suspected Orson lived. Those windows were dark, too.
I wound back my cane like a baseball bat and smashed the window in the door. Glass tinkled wildly around me. Reaching in, I opened the handle from inside and let myself in. With the glow of the cases to guide me, I hurried past the stuffed marmoset, into the smaller lab, and over to the shelves that contained the Sinclair 15. In less than a minute, I had a dozen of the little jars piled on the counter before me.
The blue door slammed opened, and Orson charged into the lab. He flipped on the overhead lights.
“What are you doing?” he demanded. “Get back!”
Instead, I picked up one of the jars and hurled it to the floor at his bare feet. The guts of it scattered in a blinking mess.
“Stop!” Orson shrieked.
I took another jar and held it high above my head.
Orson put out a hand in a gesture of caution. Shirtless, with black sweatpants, he inched his toes back from the shards of glass.
“I need some answers, Dad,” I said.
“Hold still!” he said. “Don’t kill them! You don’t realize what you’re doing!”
I smashed the second jar and reached for another.
Orson waved his hands. “Stop! Please!”
I held the jar high above my head. “Do you know what my name is?” I asked. “I’ll give you one guess.”
He hesitated, his eyes wild. I made to throw the jar.
“It’s Rosie!” he said. “Rosie Sinclair! I’m sorry. Put that down, please! I’ll talk to you, I promise, but only if you don’t kill any more seeds.”
“You’re my father, aren’t you?”
“I was, once, yes,” he said. “Please, please put that down and I’ll explain.”
I lowered it slightly and tried to ignore the way my heart was reaching for him. He looked like my father and sounded like him, too, which was even more upsetting. Still, he wasn’t completely unchanged. His face and body were older, and his bare chest showed dark, jagged scars along his ribcage. He self-consciously hitched at the waistband of his sweatpants.
“I never thought I’d meet you like this,” he said.
A laugh caught in my throat. “You didn’t expect to meet me at all,” I said. “How did this happen?” I wasn’t sure which hurt was harder to bear: that he’d never called my family in all these years, or that he’d neglected me even when I was here at Chimera.
A clicking noise came from a speaker over the door. “Everything okay there, Dr. Toomey?” asked a man’s voice.
“I’m good,” Orson said loudly. “I just dropped a box of recycling.”
“You ought to get some sleep.”
“Will do.”
The speaker went dead. I did a quick scan for camera lenses, but found none.
Orson regarded me intently. “I’m sorry,” he said more quietly. “Truly, I am.”
“Why didn’t you ever call home?” I asked.
“I’m not exactly your father anymore,” he said. “This is Robert’s body, but I’m not your father. My mind isn’t his. I didn’t think you’d recognize me. I still can barely credit that you’re actually conscious as Rosie. Robert Sinclair died a decade ago. Please put down that seed. We’ll talk.”
“If he’s dead, then who are you?” I asked.
“Orson Toomey. Please,” he said gently. “Let me put the jars back in the incubator. They’re not safe at room temperature. They’ll die.”
“They’re dreams, aren’t they?”
He nodded. “Dream seeds. They start as seeds and grow.”
“Was I in one of these jars?”
He nodded again. “We nurtured Rosie’s seed along before we put it in Althea.”
“So these others with my name on them, are they me, too?”
“They’re seeds from you, but they aren’t conscious,” he said. “They aren’t aware.”
“How do you know that?”
“They need a body to be conscious,” he said.
“But they have the potential to be conscious, too, don’t they?” I pressed him. “They’re alive?”
“The answer to that’s more complicated than I can explain in an instant,” he said. “Please, Rosie. Let me put them back. They’re incredibly fragile.”
He sidestepped the broken glass to come nearer, but I raised the jar higher again, and he stopped.
“Tell me about my dad,” I said.
He splayed a hand lightly against his chest. “Your father’s body was recovered from an ice field in Greenland a few years after the war ended,” Orson said. “He was perfectly preserved, and the scavengers who found him sold him to me. That was six, no seven years ago.”
When I was nine, I thought, calculating. My mother had remarried by then. “Did you even know who he was?” I asked.
Orson nodded. “I looked him up, of course. The U.S. Army kept records of his DNA, and they’d posted rewards for info about MIAs. Your father was presumed dead by then. I could have turned in his body, I know. No doubt you believe I should have. But I thought, just possibly, if my experiment worked, I could restore him to you alive, not dead. He was physically fit, aside from being dead. In the cold, he was perfectly preserved. He was the ideal subject.”
“So you experimented on him?”
He gestured a hand around his lab. “I’ve been doing medical research for decades. I started in degenerative brain diseases, looking for similarities. Along the way, I developed a method for harvesting dream seeds and preserving them. Then I started implanting them, practicing on cadavers, and I had some startling results. That’s when I met your father, so to speak.”
“You had no right to experiment on him,” I said. “My father was dead. He never consented. He deserved the honor of a military funeral.”
“I’m aware of that,” he said. “But would he have refused a shot at a second life?”
The idea made me pause. “What did you do to him, exactly?” I asked.
“I put my own dream seed in him,” Orson said. “It was supposed to be just a kick-starter for him, but it caught and grew. His brain function reactivated first, starting his heart and breathing. Then gradually his consciousness evolved. Me, again.”
“And what about my father? What about his consciousness?”
He shook his head gravely. “I’ve tried to find any trace of him in me. Any memories. But they’re gone.”
“So you failed,” I said.
“Yes, from your father’s perspective. But I also succeeded, from mine.” Orson folded his arms across his bare chest. “By the time I woke in this body, it was too late to tell your family what I’d done. I needed your father’s body for my own sake. I owed it to him not to make his family suffer more than they already had, so I stayed away and kept silent.”
“Where’s the original version of you?” I asked.
He gave a pained smile. “I was an old man. I overlapped with this version of me for only a few months, and then the original Orson died. His death ripped me up. It was terribly disturbing. I wasn’t sure I deserved to go on after that.”
“You didn’t,” I said coldly.
He shook his head slowly. “But how could I waste this second life? I owed your father. I vowed to use his body wisely.”