My hands go still on the datapad. My breath catches in my throat.
“Tatek,” I say, low and sharp.
He’s across the room in three seconds, scanning my face before he even looks at the screen.
“What is it?”
I angle the pad so he can see. “They’re not just wiping people. They’rereplicatingthem. Dropping behavioral imprints into clones and deploying them like replacements.”
He stiffens. “Obedient shells.”
“Controlled social roles. Preloaded with scripts, personality ticks, falsified memories. Deep fakes made flesh.”
He stares at the code, then at me.
“This is bigger than identity suppression.”
“This is identitytheft,” I snap. “And no one knows.”
I swipe again, deeper into the code stream, fingers trembling. Another file unfolds—visual metadata this time. Rows of ident-photos. All tagged Obol-adjacent. Faces I almost recognize, but something’s wrong in their eyes. Too flat. Too symmetrical. Too precise.
It clicks.
They’re clones.
I find one tagged: ‘G-4B//Sura-Alt’.
And my stomach lurches.
It’s Tatek.
But it’snot.
It’s his face, yes. His shoulders. His build.
But the eyes are dead.
The smile’s too smooth.
And the name isn’t a code—it’s a category.
“Jesus,” I breathe. “They made one of you.”
He’s silent for a long moment.
Then: “They wouldn’t have succeeded.”
“They didn’t need to,” I say. “Just enough to pass inspection. Just enough to infiltrate. Manipulate. Replace.”
He kneels beside me, eyes scanning the data again.
“We have to burn this. All of it.”
“No.” I clutch the pad tighter. “We leak it.”
“Mara—”
“No, listen. People need to know. This changes everything. This meanseveryone’svulnerable. Anyone flagged could be walking around with a goddamn clone waiting to step into their life the second they vanish.”
