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He snapped the phone shut and looked at me with his head on one side. There was a brief silence. Not one of those companionable silences that are quite enjoyable but an empty, cold silence, of people soon strangers. And that was when I had a peculiar feeling. One I hadn’t had for a while.
“Landen?”
“Yes?”
I leaned closer and lowered my voice. “I want to make love to you.”
“What, here?”
“Well, no—we could find a hotel. I’ve not felt it this strong from well before the accident—probably that holiday in Greece when you’d lost ten pounds and we had dinner at Arturo’s. On our own. No kids.”
Landen said nothing and stared at me. I frowned. It wasn’t a bad feeling—quite the opposite, of course. But it was unusual, and that worried me. Even following the accident, I still wanted him in a “that would be nice if I weren’t feeling so shitty,” sort of way, but this was like being a teenager again—that sort of lusty yearning that is born of fresh discovery and young hearts bursting to be free.
“Say something,” I said.
“What do you want me to say?”
“Anything. ‘Me, too’ would be good for starters, rapidly followed by ‘Does the Finis Hotel rent rooms by the hour?’ To which the answer is ‘Yes, notorious for it.’”
Landen gave me a weary half smile.
“If I were to say, ‘Nothing should disturb . . .’” he asked, “what would you say in reply?”
“Nothing should disturb us . . . in the Finis?”
“No, it’s a password. The one we swapped on parting less than two hours ago.”
“Oh, yes. Nothing should disturb . . . that . . . No. I can’t remember.”
“And why do you think that might be?”
He said it in a sarcastic manner that he normally would never have used on me. Not unless we were having a serious, balls-out, door-slamming “I don’t know why I sodding married you” row. But then the penny dropped and I looked down. I wasn’t holding a walking stick, I felt no pain, and I was standing upright, without a stoop. No wonder Landen could tell I wasn’t the real one straightaway. I hadn’t walked this well for a while.
“Shit,” I muttered. “I’ve been replaced.” And I looked stupidly around to see if the real me might be somewhere close by. I wasn’t, so I looked back at Landen, who raised an eyebrow.
“This is a novel approach,” he said. “A Synthetic aware that it is a Synthetic?”
“Wait, wait,” I said, knowing only too well what we did with Synthetics. “This is different. I’m me. I’m conscious, I have some of the real me’s memories. Maybe not all of them, but some, and enough.”
“You say you have,” said Landen, placing his hand in the pocket where he kept his pistol, “but that’s what you’re programmed to think. Try to make a run for it and I’ll drop you where you stand. The first time we killed one of you, it was hard to explain—until the second one turned up.”
“That’s what Stig’s coming to do, isn’t it?”
“As divisional chief of SO-13, he’s legally empowered to destroy unlicensed nonevolutionary life-forms, and that’s what you are, my friend. But before we get to that, what do you want? Why does Goliath want to replace my wife with one of their own?”
“I don’t know. Or at least if I do know, it’s not readily apparent to me. You’d really kill me?”
“Without a second thought. Still want to make love to me?”
“In an odd kind of way, yes,” I said, shifting my weight from one foot to the other. “But listen, if this is me and I am Thursday but weirdly in another body, you might actually kill me for real. And that might be it. This could be the final vessel for my consciousness.”
“Fascinating,” remarked Landen. “You must be a Mark VII or something. None of the others were so articulate.”
“Or knew they were Synthetics?”
“Right. But first things first: What did you do with the real Thursday? It’ll save a lot of time.”
“I don’t know.”
