Blackout: Book 3 of The Newsflesh Trilogy Read online

The walls of the room were featureless and white. The only thing that even resembled furniture was a narrow hospital bed with white sheets, surrounded by IV drips and beeping monitors. Thick black straps secured the room’s single occupant to her bed, holding her in place. Unlike the girl in the tank—unlike me, when I first woke up—her hair was cut short, in a precise replica of the haircut I’d worn since I was twelve. I touched the close-shorn hair at the back of my neck without realizing I was going to do it, feeling how uneven the strands were. Dr. Shaw had done her best, but she was no hairdresser.

  “This is 8b?” I asked. My voice was weaker than I wanted it to be. I swallowed hard, trying to clear away the dryness that was growing there. “What are they doing with her?”

  “They’re stabilizing her.” Gregory touched another button. A video projection appeared on one side of the window, obscuring that half of the room. It showed subject 8b being removed from her tank and shifted onto a gurney. Her hair was long in the recording, and it stuck to her face and shoulders like seaweed. “This was taken a week ago.”

  “A week—but that was after they knew that I wasn’t going to amplify. They knew I was viable.” Panic tried to rise inside me like a small, biting animal. I forced it down again as hard as I could, breathing in and out through my nose several times before I asked, “Why are they stabilizing her? What are they planning to do with her?”

  Gregory touched another button. The recording skipped, the image of the extraction being replaced by an image of the clone, now clean, clothed, and dry, with her head held up by a wedge-shaped foam pillow. Voices were speaking softly, just offscreen. I almost jumped when Dr. Thomas said, in a loud, clear tone, “Georgia, open your eyes.”

  And the recording of subject 8b opened her eyes.

  A squeaky moaning sound escaped my lips before I could hold it in. Gregory put a hand on my shoulder, but he didn’t say anything. There was nothing for him to say.

  Her eyes were black, her pupils so enlarged that there was no band of color between them and the surrounding sclera. Shark’s eyes, zombie eyes… or the eyes of a person with retinal Kellis-Amberlee, the reservoir condition I’d lived with for most of my life. With those eyes, she looked more like me than I ever could. Someone who was shown a picture of me would probably allow that I looked a lot like a reporter who died during the Ryman campaign. Someone who was shown a picture of her…

  “How?” I managed to rasp.

  “Surgical alteration,” said Gregory. He took his hand off my shoulder. “They couldn’t induce a specific reservoir condition—when they tried, it either caused immediate amplification, or it triggered a reservoir condition in a different part of the body. Getting one with stable retinal Kellis-Amberlee in both eyes could have taken years.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “They’ve had to do more procedures than originally planned. It turns out we don’t really understand the changes retinal Kellis-Amberlee makes to the structure of the eye as well as we thought we did. As soon as they removed the irises, the retinas began to detach. They’ve been replaced with artificial lenses, and the eyes have been stabilized.”

  And since I was known to have retinal Kellis-Amberlee, no one would raise any red flags over anomalies in her retinal scans, and the surgical tampering would never be caught. “Slick,” I said. My voice sounded flat, like all the emotion had been somehow pressed out of it. That was a reasonably accurate assessment of how I was feeling. I swallowed again, and asked, “How much time do I have?”

  Gregory shot me a sharp look. “What do you mean?”

  “They didn’t fix my eyes. They wouldn’t have fixed… her… eyes if they didn’t expect people to see her. Logically, that means they didn’t expect people to see me. If I was the finished product, they would have stopped once I was stable.” My voice was starting to rise at the end of my sentences. I forced it back down, and repeated, “How much time do I have?”

  “We think it’ll take about two weeks for them to finish all the tests they have scheduled, and for them to get subject 8b all the way functional. Again, they expected everything to be ready sooner, but they don’t want any lingering pain from the operations to distract from the recovery process.”

  I wouldn’t have paid any special attention to my eyes hurting when I woke up. I’d been too busy freaking out over not being dead. I decided to let that go for the moment. “After that?”

  “Another two weeks, to be sure the subject won’t spontaneously amplify or suffer organ failure.”

  So that had been a genuine risk, not just another way to scare me. Funny thing; even knowing that, I was still scared plenty. “What’s going to happen to me?”

  “They’re going to keep you as long as you stay useful, and then…” Gregory’s voice trailed off. “I’m sorry.”

  I sighed. “Right. That was a bad question. Why are they doing this? Why waste all this time with me if they’re just going to bring her out of her chemical coma and drop me down the incinerator chute? What are they gaining from keeping me around?”

  “You’re the display model. Why do you think Dr. Thomas was so upset when you went and got your hair cut? They want you to be as pretty as possible, to show the investors that this process is safe and painless and yields the best possible results.” Gregory touched the control panel. The image of subject 8b’s eyes vanished, replaced by a four-way split-screen of me being… me. Me, sitting on the bed, one leg tucked under my body, the other rhythmically kicking the mattress. Me, pacing around the edges of the room, my fingers snarled in the short hair above my ears. Me, eating. Me, walking down the hall. The views flickered from perspective to perspective, making it clear both that I had been recorded from multiple angles, and that someone had taken the time to edit it all together into a single continuous feed.

  “What?” I asked, staring at the screen. My face stared back at me from a dozen different angles, and every angle showed the eyes that didn’t look as much like my own as the eyes on the clone intended to replace me.

  “Everyone knows who Georgia Mason is. The girl who broadcast her own death and turned the tide of a political election. The one who told us to rise. You were the perfect candidate to prove that a person—a real, recognizable person—can return from the grave as themselves, rather than as a pretty, mindless toy.” Gregory glanced at me as he spoke. “They made you as accurate as possible, so that you could be the showroom model. You didn’t think the CDC bankrolled you on their own, did you?”

  “I didn’t really think about it,” I said. “So what’s… the other one… supposed to be?”

  “The street model. They spent a lot of money getting you right, and while you have a certain ‘unwitting celebrity spokesperson’ cachet, there’s no reason to waste good research. Building an accurate Georgia Mason taught them how to make an inaccurate one.”

  For a moment, I just froze. It was like everything in me shut down, my brain refusing to cope with the enormity of what it was being asked to process. Then, slowly, I took a breath, nodded, and said, “How inaccurate are we talking? If I’m Georgia Mason, who’s she?”

  “Not quite Georgia Mason.” He tapped the control panel again. There was a single muted beep before the servos engaged, followed by the deeply comforting whir of the metal shutter descending. I wouldn’t have to look at her anymore. Thank God.

  “But I’m not quite Georgia Mason either, am I?” I looked up at him. “I can’t be. I’m willing to believe that the CDC can clone people. Hell, I’ve known for years that the CDC could clone people. But there was no convenient backup of my—of her—memories. So who am I?”

  “You’re Georgia Mason.” Gregory stepped away from the wall, moving back into my field of view. “The point of all this was proving that the CDC can conquer death. I don’t understand all the science. My field is virology and corporate espionage, not human cloning and memory transfer. But I’ve seen your charts, and while you’re not a perfect replica of yourself, you have a ninety-seven percent accuracy rating
. You’re as close as science can get to bringing a person back from the dead.”

  “But how?”

  “Neural snapshotting.”

  I had to allow that it made sense, as much as I understood it, which wasn’t all that well. Thought, memory, everything that makes a person who they are, it’s all electricity, little sparks and flashes encoded in the gray matter of our minds. The Kellis-Amberlee virus takes us over, but it also preserves the brain long after the point of what should be death. It turns those electrical impulses back on, over and over again. If the CDC had a way of taking a picture of those electrical patterns, and then somehow imprinting them on a blank mind… it could work.

  I shook my head, frowning at Gregory. “How can you be so calm?”

  “How can you?” he shot back. “You’re not the first Georgia I’ve brought here, although you’re the most accurate. The highest transfer score before yours was seventy-five. She started screaming as soon as she saw the clone, and she didn’t stop. You’re the only one who hasn’t cried.”

  “I’ll cry later, I promise,” I said, and I meant it. This was the sort of thing that needed to be processed before I could really let myself get upset. “How close is she? If I’m the ninety-seven percent girl, what’s she?”

  “Subject 8b has been prepared through a modified conditioning process, which should, if fully successful, result in a forty-four percent accuracy rating when compared to the original, but with some behavioral adjustments,” said Gregory. “She’ll look like you. She’ll act like you…”

  “She won’t be me,” I finished. “So what’s she for?”

  For the first time since we’d arrived in the lab, Gregory looked at me like I’d said something wrong. “You mean you don’t know?” he asked.

  “No. How would I—” I stopped mid-sentence, a sudden horrible certainty flooding over me. “They wouldn’t.”

  “Wouldn’t what?”

  Somehow, the one word I needed to say was harder to force out than all the others had been. “Shaun?”

  Gregory nodded. “That’s the plan. You’ll stay here as long as you’re useful, and she’ll be put where he can find her. Mr. Mason is not particularly stable these days, and they’re reasonably sure he’ll believe whatever he’s told if he thinks it’s going to get you back. He’s not going to ask questions. He’s not going to look for double-crosses. He’s just going to open the doors and let her in.”

  My lips thinned into a hard line. Maybe I wasn’t really who I thought I was. Maybe I wasn’t really anyone at all—if I wasn’t Georgia Mason, but I shared her DNA and ninety-seven percent of her personality profile, who else could I be? The one thing I was absolutely sure of was that none of that mattered, because these bastards were not going to use my genetic code to honey-trap the only human being in this world that I had ever been willing to die for.

  “Then that’s just not going to happen,” I said. “What do we need to do?”

  Gregory glanced at his watch. “Right now, we need to get you back to your room before our window closes. I should be able to get another message to you tomorrow night. You need to keep your eyes open. Keep behaving normally. They’re not going to take you off display unless you do something that makes it look like you’re beginning to destabilize.”

  “By ‘take me off display,’ you mean kill me, right?”

  He nodded.

  “Got it,” I said. “And after that?”

  “After that?” said Gregory. He smiled a little, clearly trying to look encouraging. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that all he was really managing to do was look scared. “I think it’s about time that we got you out of here, don’t you?”

  “My thoughts exactly,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  I don’t know why I bother writing these entries. It feels less like a blog and more like a diary every day, like I should be drawing hearts in the margins and writing stupid shit like “OMG I wonder if he’ll ever get over his stupid dead sister and love me” or “wish I could go shopping, I’ve had to burn half my favorite shirts due to contamination.” But it’s routine, and it’s a form of saying “fuck you” to the people who’ve driven us to this. Fuck you, government conspiracy. Fuck you, CDC. We’ll keep writing, and someday, we’ll be able to post again, and when that happens, you’d better pray we have something better to talk about than you.

  But I don’t think we will.

  Shaun is starting to crack. He’s covering it well, but I can see the fractures. During the outbreak yesterday, there were points where he just froze. It was like he wasn’t even a part of the situation anymore. I don’t know if he knows he’s doing it, and I’m scared. I’m scared he’s going to get one of us killed, and he’s never going to forgive himself. I’m scared he’s going to get even worse, and we’re going to let him, because we love him, and because we loved Georgia.

  And I’m still going to follow him to Florida. God. My mother was right. I really am an idiot.

  —From Charming Not Sincere, the blog of Rebecca Atherton, July 25, 2041. Unpublished.

  She remained calm and reasonable throughout the encounter. She was able to ask coherent questions and give coherent answers. She remained controlled during the walk back to her room, and was able to return to her bed and feign normal sleep successfully enough to convince the orderly who came to relieve me. Stress fractures are still possible, but I believe we should continue as planned. I think this one is stable.

  —Taken from a message sent by Dr. Gregory Lake, July 25, 2041. Recipient unknown.

  Ten

  The morning dawned bright and clean, with a clear blue sky that afforded absolutely no cloud cover. Any spy satellites that happened to pick up on our anomalous route—not many people take the back roads anymore, and fewer still do it in a way that allows them to skip all security checkpoints—would have a perfect line of sight.

  “If we get picked up by the DEA on suspicion of being Canadian marijuana smugglers, I’m going to be pissed,” I muttered.

  Becks looked up from her tablet, fingers still tracing an intricate dance across the screen. It was sort of unnerving that she could do that by nothing but the memory of where her apps were installed. I need a keyboard, or I lose my place in seconds. “What’s that?”

  “Nothing.” I kept my eyes on the road.

  Liar.

  I didn’t answer. We’d get into a fight if I did, and then Becks would have to pretend she didn’t mind sitting there listening while I argued with myself. Back at the lab, she’d been able to leave the room when that started. Now that we were on the road again, she had nowhere to run. And neither did I.

  The reality of what we were doing was starting to sink in. Dr. Abbey had insisted we get some sleep after the lab cleanup was finished—although not before she’d drawn enough blood from me to keep her surviving lab monkeys busy for a couple of weeks. “Some of us have to work while you take your little road trip,” she’d said, like this was some sort of exciting pleasure cruise. Just me and Becks and the ghost of George, sailing gaily down the highway to meet our certain doom.

  Not that we were actually on the highway unless we absolutely had to be. Dr. Abbey had installed a new module on our GPS, one programmed with all the underground and questionably secure stops between Shady Cove and Berkeley. Once that was done, Alaric and Mahir worked together to reprogram our mapping software, convincing it the roads we should take were the ones the system flagged as “least desirable.” So we left Shady Cove not via the convenient and well-maintained Highway 62, but on a narrow pre-Rising street called Rogue River Drive.

  We’d been on the road for almost four hours, playing chicken with major highways the entire time. Alaric and Mahir’s mapping software sent us down a motley collection of frontage roads, residential streets, and half-forgotten rural back roads, all of them combining to trace roughly the same directional footprints as first Highway 62, and then Highway 5, the big backbone of the West Coast. As long as we stuck to the directions and didn’t get c
ocky, we’d be able to stay mostly off the radar. As for the rest of the time…

  “We’re going to need to stop for gas in fifty miles or so,” said Becks, attention focusing on her tablet. She tapped the screen twice; out of the corner of my eye, I saw the graphics flash and divide, changing to some new configuration. “Do we have any viable gas stations?”

  “Let me check the map.” I took one hand off the wheel and pushed a button at the front of our clip-on GPS device, saying, “Secure gas.”

  “Recalculating route,” replied the GPS. The module had the same pleasant Canadian voice as Dr. Abbey’s main computer. “Please state security requirements.”

  “Uh, we’d like to not die, if that’s okay with you,” I said.

  “Recalculating route.”

  “Notice how she says that no matter what we ask for?” I slanted a glance at Becks. “Half the time she doesn’t even change her mind about where we’re going.”

  “Maybe she’s just fucking with you.”

  “The thought had crossed my mind.”

  “The nearest secure gas station is approximately twenty-seven miles from your current location,” announced the GPS. “Do you wish to continue?”

  Becks looked up. “Define ‘secure.’ ”

  “The station is located in a designated hazard zone, and has been officially abandoned for the past eighteen years. Security systems are running at acceptable levels. The last known transmission was received three days ago, and indicated the availability of fuel, food, and ammunition.”

  “Works for me,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  “Recalculating route,” said the GPS, and went silent, a new set of street names flashing on the tiny screen.

  “I so wish we could do an exposé on all of this,” said Becks wistfully. “I mean, the actual smuggler’s railroad? Think about the ratings!”

  “Too bad we’re not purely in the ratings business these days, isn’t it?”