[Secret Project] Chapter 7

Dupes Chapter 7: On the Run

The three of me crouched behind a hedge outside the Outside Inn. It was actually more of a motel, despite the name—with rooms that opened out into the rain-drenched parking lot. The Outside Inn had seen better days. Its walls were flecked with dirt, the paint was peeling off, and water was streaming out of numerous holes in the roof gutters.

It may be shabby, but this motel was the last hope we had for a roof over our heads tonight. All the other accommodation in this part of Rochamble was either too expensive, booked out, or too stringent with security. Ordinarily, good security was a selling point, but for a trio on the run, it would only get us caught.

My apartment was now the scene of a double murder—or whatever you call it when a crooked enforcer murders another enforcer, then my clone kills the crooked enforcer, but all the other enforcers think I murdered them both. The enforcers would be swarming the city in search of me. We could only hope it’d take the blues a while to make their way to a dump like this on far side of town. I was under no illusions about what would happen if the enforcers got their hands on one of me. There would be no trial for a blue-killer. A bullet to the brain would be the best I could hope for.

“It’ll do,” Fritz whispered.

By Fritz, I mean the original Fritz. I, one of his clones, was going by the name Franz, while the other clone had adopted the name Felix. Fritz and Felix looked completely identical to my eyes. They both had some extra bruises, received courtesy of Centurion Cole’s fist. The fist had connected with Fritz’s face, and Felix had inherited his bruises when he appeared. I, Franz, who had popped into existence before that particular tussle, only had the injuries inflicted by the other enforcers the night before. Thanks to the dose of nanites the clinic nurse had given Fritz, all of our injuries would heal fast. We clones apparently had copies of the short-lived nanites swimming about under our skin. The difference was I had one less set of fresh bruises for the little critters to repair.

Being slightly more presentable than Fritz and Felix (and more expendable than the former), I was our designated talker today. Dashing through the door to the reception office, I rang the bell at the front desk.

A young woman approached the desk few minutes later, rubbing her eyes blearily. She wore pyjamas, and her hair was tousled. Eyeing me up and down, she said, “Rough night?”

I gave a weary chuckle. “You could say that.”

Assuming she was just another guest, I said nothing more until she sat behind the desk and looked at me expectantly. “How can I help you, sir?”

“Oh, uh, room for three, please,” I said.

“Adults?”

“Me and my brothers—adult brothers. We’ll need separate beds.”

She held out her hand. “Sixty crowns a night.”

I gave her enough cash to cover a three-night stay. Beyond that…well, we’d have to play it by ear.

Handing me the keys, she glanced down the puddle of water forming at my feet. Her mouth quirked upwards at the corner. “I’ll get you some extra towels.”

By the time I located our room and finished fumbling with the lock, the towels the receptionist had given me were nearly as soaked as I was. Sending Fritz and Felix a surreptitious thumbs-up, I stepped inside. A cockroach scuttled out from underfoot, and I let out a resigned sigh. It could be worse. Our room was dingy and cramped, but it was warm and dry, and most importantly, private.

Exhausted, we sat around the table, regarding each other silently. The full weight of what had happened was only just beginning to bear down on me. In a single night, everything had changed. I’d been shot at, arrested, framed for murder, and killed two people in self-defence. And to top it all off, I’d died three times.

What would Lucie and Jaheem think of me after the enforcers told them I was a murderer? Would they just believe what they were told? I rather doubted that. How much had they seen through Lucie’s hand camera back at the harbour? Had they seen my clones? Had they seen the other clones die?

I hadn’t gotten a chance to speak to them back at the enforcement centre, and I longed to talk to them now; to let them know what had really happened back at my apartment. But talking to them—even over the phone—would not only alert the enforcers, but it might put my friends in danger as well. After all, it wasn’t just the enforcers I had to worry about…

Felix attempted to break the silence first. “So…”

“So…” I agreed.

“I think I know what you are,” Fritz said. “Or at least, how you came to be.”

“You created us,” both clones replied in unison.

“Alright, that’s just creepy,” Fritz told us. “But yeah, each time a new me has appeared, I had that feeling of being in two places at once. And each…split, for lack of a better word, happened either when I was in danger, or after I idly wished there were two of me. In other words, you came when my subconscious called you.”

“Rather like a delusion,” I pointed out. “Except we have a physical presence that other people can see and hear and touch.”

“Exactly. I think you’re some kind of projection. Like three dimensional images, but tangible ones.”

“Projections or not, we do have minds of our own,” I said. “You do realise that, right?”

“Of course,” Fritz said. “I remember what it feels like to be a clone. It feels like being…me. If this works how we think it does, we really are the same person. When you die, you don’t really die. You merge back into me, and I become the sum of all of our experiences.”

Felix grimaced. “Not that I’m in a hurry to take another bullet for you. It hurts like shit.”

“Not as much as drowning,” Fritz said, and we all gave a little shudder at the recollection. “Obviously I’m not too keen to relive your deaths. But you know as well as I do what we might have to do to get out of our predicament. The enforcers will be coming after us. They aren’t gonna wait to hear our side of the story before they start shooting.”

“And we’re supposed to be your disposable meat shields?” Felix said. “I don’t like that idea.”

“I was thinking more along the lines of giving them what they want.”

“They want us dead,” I pointed out.

“Exactly.”

I felt my eyes narrowing as it dawned on me what he was suggesting. “You want to fake your own death. By having one of us die in your place.”

Fritz nodded. “It may be our only option.”

My first reaction was, of course, a vehement rejection of the idea. Self-preservation is a powerful instinct, and it doesn’t go away just because you’re the duplicate of a real person. It was one thing for a clone to sacrifice himself on the spur of the moment to save original-Fritz’s life. But to plan our own death just to improve his situation?

Once again, it was Felix who spoke first. “There are some gaping holes in this idea.”

I was a little surprised that he would focus on that, rather than the suggestion itself.

“Oh I know,” Fritz agreed.

“Let me spell them out for you, in case you missed something,” Felix said. “First, the enforcers aren’t the only ones who want us dead. There’s Moh, and by extension, M3 as a whole.”

“They’re obviously the ones who framed us for Centurion Taylor’s murder,” I said, somewhat uselessly.

Felix nodded. “Moh and his goons saw that there are more than one of us. They saw us die repeatedly. They may not know how it works—hell, we don’t know how it works—but they know enough to be a problem.”

“Some of the enforcers might also have noticed that something was fishy,” I said. “Although they wouldn’t have seen the clone very clearly through the service mech’s canopy before they filled him with lead.”

Fritz nodded along with us. He’d presumably thought of all of this already, but it was still useful to hear it articulated aloud.

“Second, when we die, we disappear,” Felix continued. “No body. Not even any blood gets left behind.”

“That’s an assumption,” Fritz said. “We’ve only witnessed two clone deaths directly. Both by gunshot wounds. Fred’s drowning doesn’t count, because we can only remember the moments leading up to his death, not what happened immediately afterwards. The sea washes away a lot of evidence.”

“It’s an assumption, but an educated one based on what we’ve seen so far,” I said.

“If we’re gonna try to fake my death, we need more certainty,” Fritz said. “We may only get one shot at this, and if we blow it, not only will the enforcers and the syndicate still be on our tails, but they might learn the truth about us.”

“I don’t like where this is going,” I said warily.

“Nor do I,” Fritz said. “But we need to figure out exactly how this thing works. And that will require…experimentation. One of you will need to die. Repeatedly. So who will it be?”