“What about the gun?”
Something flickered in his eyes, but he merely chuckled. “That old thing hasn’t worked in years. I tossed it.”
Nodding, Lena led the way out again. She had no idea what she said on the way to the shuttle terminal. Thankfully, the car was crowded when she and Morris climbed on. She fell silent, grateful for a respite, staring absently at the other passengers, at the blurred view beyond the windows that was little more than streaks of lights and the concrete walls of the tube until they surfaced beyond old city and shot skyward toward the skyline segment of the tube that traversedthe newer areas of Grand City.
Morris, she discovered, was babbling about seeing the sights.
She smiled in what she thought was all of the appropriate places. A coldness had begun to creep over her that she couldn’t shake. Surreptitiously, she kept glancing at Morris--his hands, his build, his weathered face--his clothing, his neat hair.
Morris had never been slovenly. He was very particular about good hygiene and he bathed and groomed with regularity. Beyond that, though, he wasn’t a primper and he tended to be very careless in his appearance. He bathed. He raked the tangles from his hair every morning, brushed his teeth, shaved--thereafter, he didn’t give his appearance a thought. He wore whatever was clean, no matter how it clashed with other articles of clothing or how threadbare or ragged it might be. Once he’d combed his hair, he didn’t touch it, which meant it was all over the place within hours of rising, and he didn’t cut it until it began to be a nuisance--most often sawing it off himself with haphazard results.
Lena wanted, badly, to think that Morris had gone to so much trouble to groom himself so that he’d be a credit to her.
She didn’t believe it for one moment, though, simply because she knew it would never occur to Morris that he wasn’t.
Wild thoughts kept tumbling through her mind.
He hadn’t made one comment about the gov--not one, not even when they’d passed the building on the way to the terminal that had anti-gov sentiments painted all over it.
As the shuttle halted at her stop and she got up from her seat like a robot and followed the line of people getting off, something Morris had told her months ago popped into her head.
He’d said rumors had begun to circulate that the gov was replacing people with their clones, clones that had been carefully programmed to conform to gov policies.
She’d actually laughed when he’d told her that because it was just so ridiculous even to consider such a thing. In the first place, cloning humans was illegal. It had always been illegal, and it was unnecessary anyway for growing replacement organs. If anyone needed a replacement, they could grow the organ. They didn’t need to invest the time and money into growing a whole person, and the economy was still in horrible shape. Even after years and years of struggling, things were only just returning to normal. No way could the gov afford that kind of project. A private company, maybe, but not the gov, which had gone bankrupt during the famine riots and still hadn’t recovered.
And why would a private company want to do such a thing? Or feel the need for such a thing?
It would take years and years of research--illegal research that they would’ve had to keep secret all that time and there was no profit in it that she could see.
Besides, clones couldn’t be an exact replica of a person. People were too complex. Their personalities were developed and shaped by their life experiences. Sure, she supposed with enough research they might be able to copy a person, and they could use the same accelerating techniques they used to produce mature organs to develop them before the person they were copying died of old age, but they’d still just be an imitation. The moment they began talking and interacting with others, people who knew them well would know it wasn’t the person it was supposed to be.
She glanced at Morris again as they threaded their way slowly toward the people tubes.
He was old. Even she had no idea how old he was, but he remembered the famine riots. He even remembered the last of the great storms.
It was ridiculous. The thoughts tumbling through her mind were just plain crazy.
Why did she feel like weeping then? Why did she feel like somebody had just ripped her heart out of her chest?
Because she knew they’d done something to him. All these years she’d ignored his ramblings, certain that he was just paranoid, but he wasn’t the Morris that had been a father to her and her brother. They’d--somebody had--been fucking with his mind.
Or maybe she was just being paranoid? He was old. Maybe he’d had some sort of seizure?
Could something like that alter his personality?
She smiled at him again when they got into the lift tube and she’d pressed the 45th level. “How long since you had a check up?” she asked tentatively.
He frowned at her. “Why would you ask me a thing like that?” he demanded tersely.
Lena almost felt better. That sounded a lot more like the Morris she knew and loved.
Some of the shock was wearing off, but she didn’t feel a whole lot better. “You don’t eat right and you’re no spring chicken. I’m worried about you. I’d feel a lot better if you’d go in for a checkup.”
He shrugged. “I’ll think about it.”
The urge to burst into tears assailed her again, stinging her nose and eyes. That wasn’t like Morris at all.
She managed a tremulous smile. “We’re going to have such fun together. It’ll be like old times.”
