“So you’re me,” Charles Boutin said to Jared. “Funny. I thought I’d be taller.”
Jared said nothing. On arrival at the science station he had been confined to a crèche, tightly secured, and wheeled through the high, bare hallways until he arrived at what he assumed was a laboratory, filled with unfamiliar machines. Jared was left there for what seemed like hours before Boutin entered and strolled right up to the crèche, examining Jared physically as if he were a large and really interesting bug. Jared hoped Boutin would come up far enough to receive a head butt. He did not.
“That was a joke,” Boutin said to Jared.
“I know,” Jared said. “It just wasn’t funny.”
“Well,” Boutin said. “I’m out of practice. You may have noticed the Obin are not the sort to crack wise.”
“I noticed,” Jared said. During the entire trip to the science station, the Obin were utterly silent. The only words the head Obin had said to Jared were “get out” when they arrived and “get in” when they opened the portable crèche.
“You can blame the Consu for that,” Boutin said. “When they made the Obin, I guess they forgot to drop in a humor module. Among the many other things they apparently forgot.”
Despite himself—or because of whose memories and personality he held in his head—Jared’s attention focused. “Then it’s true?” he asked. “The Consu uplifted the Obin.”
“If you want to call it that,” Boutin said. “Although the word uplift by its nature implies good intentions on the part of the uplifter, which is not in evidence here. From what I can get from the Obin, the Consu one day wondered what would happen if you made some species smart. So they came to Obinur, found an omnivore in a minor ecological niche, and gave it intelligence. You know, just to see what would happen next.”
“What happened next?” Jared said.
“A long and cascading series of unintended consequences, my friend,” Boutin said. “That end, for now, with you and me here in this lab. It’s a direct line from there to here.”
“I don’t understand,” Jared said.
“Of course you don’t,” Boutin said. “You don’t have all the data. I didn’t have all the data before I came here, so even if you know everything I know, you wouldn’t know that. How much of what I know do you know?”
Jared said nothing. Boutin smiled. “Enough, anyway,” he said. “I can tell you have some of my same interests. I saw how you perked up when I talked about the Consu. But maybe we should start with the simple things. Like: What is your name? I find it disconcerting to talk to my sort-of clone without having something to call you.”
“Jared Dirac,” Jared said.
“Ah,” Boutin said. “Yes, the Special Forces naming protocol. Random first name, notable scientist last name. I did some work with the Special Forces at one time—indirectly, since you people don’t like non–Special Forces getting in your way. What is that name you call us?”
“Realborn,” Jared said.
“Right,” Boutin said. “You like keeping yourself apart from the realborn. Anyway, the naming protocol of the Special Forces always amused me. The pool of last names is actually pretty limited: A couple hundred or so, and mostly classical European scientists. Not to mention the first names! Jared. Brad. Cynthia. John. Jane.” The names came out as a good-natured sneer. “Hardly a non-Western name among them, and for no good reason, since Special Forces aren’t recruited from Earth like the rest of the CDF. You could have been called Yusef al-Biruni and it would have been all the same to you. The set of names Special Forces uses implicitly says something about the point of view of the people who created them, and created you. Don’t you think?”
“I like my name, Charles,” Jared said.
“Touché,” Boutin said. “But I got my name through family tradition, where yours was just mixed and matched. Not that there’s anything wrong with ‘Dirac.’ Named for Paul Dirac, no doubt. Ever heard of the ‘Dirac sea’?”
“No,” Jared said.
“Dirac proposed that what vacuum really was, was a vast sea of negative energy,” Boutin said. “And that’s a lovely image. Some physicists at the time thought it was an inelegant hypothesis, and maybe it was. But it was poetic, and they didn’t appreciate that aspect. But that’s physicists for you. Not exactly brimming over with poetry. The Obin are excellent physicists, and not one of them has any more poetry than a chicken. They definitely wouldn’t appreciate the Dirac sea. How are you feeling?”
“Constrained,” Jared said. “And I need to piss.”