Blackout

GEORGIA: Thirty-seven

Steve was a constant, silent presence behind us as Rick steered me down the hall. It was weirdly like being back on the campaign trail, only I wasn’t carrying a gun, Rick wasn’t carrying a cat, and I was no longer sure who the good guys were.

On second thought, it was nothing at all like being back on the campaign trail.

The hall ended at a door that looked like real oak. Rick let go of me to press his palm flat against the testing panel next to the door. A small red light clicked on above it, oscillating rapidly between red and green before settling on green. It remained lit for less than five seconds. Then it clicked off, and the door clicked open.

“I’m going to be waiting for you on the other side,” said Rick. “Do you trust Steve?”

It was an interesting question. If Ryman was no longer one of the good guys, I wasn’t sure I trusted anyone. But of the people I didn’t trust, Steve was one of the ones I distrusted the least. “We’ll be fine,” I said.

“I’ll see you in a moment,” said Rick, and opened the door. Part of me wondered what kind of awesome security procedures they’d have in place to prevent people from following each other through—always a risk, no matter how much the people who design the airlock systems try to keep it from happening. Some airlocks will gas you if you try to go through without getting a blood test. Somehow I doubted they’d use something that crude on a door that might be opened by the President of the United States. The rest of me understood that playing with the security system was something too stupid for Shaun to do, and that meant it was absolutely too dumb for me.

The door closed behind Rick, the little red light making another brief appearance before shutting itself politely off. “Cute,” I said, stepping forward to press my hand against the testing plate. Needles bit into the skin at the point where each of my fingers joined my palm. That was an unusual spot for a test array. I took a small, startled breath, finally pulling away as the light turned green and clicked off. “That’s my cue.”

“I’ll be right through,” said Steve. He smiled encouragingly when I looked back at him, and I held that image firmly in my mind as I stepped through the door to whatever was waiting on the other side. Steve wouldn’t have smiled while he sent me to my death. I might be a clone, and Ryman might be corrupt, but some things about a person’s essential nature never change.

The door opened on a narrow hallway that looked like it was constructed hundreds of years before the Rising and never substantially redecorated. Rick was waiting. A relieved smile spread across his face when he saw me. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come.”

“What, you thought I’d go back to the nice man in the lab coat who was about to have me recycled?” I dropped the pretense of having a migraine, straightening and looking at him flatly. “You could have warned me what we were walking into.”

“No. I couldn’t have.” The door swung open as Steve joined us in the hall. Rick switched his attention from me to Steve, asking, “Anyone following us?”

“Not that I saw,” rumbled Steve. I raised an eyebrow. He explained, “This is one of the tunnels built during the Cold War, in case we needed to evacuate the capital. They probably wouldn’t have been any use in a nuclear strike—a nuke’s a pretty damn big deal—but there’s one thing they do manage, quite nicely.”

I nodded slowly, catching his meaning. “We’re underground. No wireless transmission.”

“We sweep this hall hourly for bugs. For the moment, we’re in the clear.” Steve looked past me to Rick. “You can proceed, Mr. Vice President.”

“Thank you, Steve.” Rick sighed, beginning to walk. “It really is good to see you.”

“Most people just send flowers. Raising the dead is a little extreme.” I matched my steps to his, watching him as we walked. “What’s going on, Rick? What’s really going on?”

“I meant it when I said that, if it had been up to me, I would have simply handed you over to Shaun as soon as you woke up enough to know yourself.” A muscle in Rick’s jaw twitched as he continued. “I will go to my grave knowing that I have been responsible for your death more than twenty times. Each time one of the clones of the original Georgia Mason was decanted I told myself, ‘That’s it. No more. If she’s not real, we find another way.’ But each time, I couldn’t think of another way, and we needed you. I needed you.”

“Why?”

“Same reason those people back there were hoping you’d play nicely with the other children—people associate your face with the truth. If you tell them a lie they want to believe, they won’t question it.”

“And the government can keep on killing people like me. People like your wife. God, Rick, is that really what you want?”

“No. That’s what they want.” Rick stopped at an unsecured door, pushing it open. Gregory was sitting at a terminal on the other side, with Dr. Shoji looking over his shoulder. I couldn’t even be surprised. Rick kept talking: “I want you to tell the world the truth. I want you to blow it all to hell. People believe you. People believe in you, because of the way you died. They’ll believe the truth even if they don’t want to, as long as they’re hearing it from you.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Hello, Georgia,” said Gregory, looking up from the screen. “It’s good to see you again.”

“It was touch and go for a while there, but I pulled through,” I said. “How about you?”

“Minor burns, concussion, and I won’t be working with the CDC again anytime soon. That’s all right. I was tired of them anyway.”

“Good.” I turned to Rick. “Now please. Explain. A huge global conspiracy has ruined my life—hell, has ended my life, and then started it over again, leaving me with probably the worst identity issues I could imagine—and they did it for what? So you could clone me and use me to sell ice to the Eskimos?”

“A huge global conspiracy has ruined your life. If it helps, they also killed my wife.” Rick’s smile faded like it had never been there at all. “I took Lisa’s death for a suicide, because that’s what they told me it was. I found out differently only when I saw her file. They did it because of what you saw back in that room—there is no cure for Kellis-Amberlee. There’s never going to be a cure. There’s just going to be a war with the virus, one we can’t win, but can only adapt to. We can only survive it. And that’s not acceptable to some people.”

“So they’re doing this instead?”

“It didn’t start out like this, Georgia. It started out with good intentions—God, such good intentions. They thought they were taking steps to protect the country. In the end, no one noticed when protection turned into imprisonment, or when ‘for the good of the people’ turned into ‘for the good of the people in power.’ It was all baby steps, all the way.”

“Aren’t the worst things usually that way?” I asked. “So why’s Ryman on their side now? Wasn’t he supposed to be the good guy? The one we could depend on?”

Rick didn’t say anything. He just looked at me, waiting. He didn’t have to wait long.

“Emily,” I whispered. “Emily Ryman has retinal KA.”

“Which makes her an excellent candidate for an ‘accidental’ death if he stops playing along—and you’re not their first clone. Just the first one that really replicates the person you were based on. If you’d been alive for the last year, you would have noticed that Emily rarely speaks in public. She just stands and smiles. Does that sound like the Emily Ryman you know?”

I stared at him in mute horror. Rick continued: “They replaced her the night after the inauguration, and now she and the children are hostages against the president’s good behavior. He’s in the same position you are. He’s a perfect figurehead, because even people who believe all politicians are corrupt remember his association with you on the campaign trail—and they remember what happened to Rebecca Ryman. They believe in him, even if they don’t realize it.” Rick laughed a little, bitterly. “I think this may have been the plan all along. Tate was never going to wind up in power. Ryman was too good a puppet to pass up.”

“I think I hate the human race,” I said.

“There’s the Georgia Mason we all know and love,” said Steve. “Now the question is, what are we going to do about it?”

I paused. “You mean I’m standing in a room with the Vice President of the United States, a member of the Secret Service, and two renegade EIS scientists, and you expect the clone to make the decisions? See, this is why this country is in trouble all the damn time. The people running it are crazy.”

“We just want to know if you’ll help,” said Dr. Shoji.

“And by help, you mean…?”

“Will you do what you did in Sacramento?”

What I did in Sacramento was reveal Tate’s dirty dealing and the fact that someone had been bankrolling him—but we never suspected the CDC, and so mostly, what I did was make sure Ryman got into power. That, and die. I knew they were asking me to tell the truth again, to tell it for them this time, but I couldn’t help remembering the way it felt to know that I was coming to an end. It wasn’t my memory, just a snapshot stolen from the virus-riddled mind of a dead woman, but that didn’t make it feel any less real. I died in Sacramento. If I did what they wanted me to do, I could very well die again.

And if I was going to be the kind of person who valued her life more than she valued the truth, I wasn’t going to be Georgia Mason at all. Unless I wanted to find someone else I was willing to be, this was what I was made for.

“We have to get Emily—the real Emily—away from the CDC, and get the kids out of here,” I said slowly. “They’re going to be civilians in a position to confirm my story. If I start posting while they’re still hostages, they won’t make it out of here alive.”

Steve cracked his knuckles. “Don’t worry about them. The First Lady still has friends in the Secret Service. We can extract the kids at any time.”

“Dr. Shaw is organizing a team to extract the First Lady from the CDC installation where she’s being held, and move her to a secure EIS facility near here,” said Dr. Shoji.

“The EIS has been a busy little secret government organization.” I looked levelly at Dr. Shoji. “If I do this, I need to know that we’re not replacing one bad deal with another. What are your plans?”

“I don’t speak for the EIS as a whole, and I can’t see the future,” he said. “But for the past ten years at least, we’ve been bleeding off the best recruits the CDC gets. We’ve been getting the members of your generation, the ones who want a solution that doesn’t always involve a bullet. I think that corruption is a risk for every organization. Even ours. But we’re going to be very busy for quite some time, just cleaning up the mess that’s been made for us. If the EIS is going to go the way of the CDC, it probably won’t be within my lifetime.”

“Whereas the CDC is a bad deal right now,” I said. “That’s fair. But you realize that if I do this, if I get involved, and you ever, ever start to cross the line—”

“I can’t promise what the future will be. All I can do is promise that the EIS will try to make sure we have one.”

I nodded. “Fine. Steve, get the kids out of here. Dr. Shoji, do whatever you need to do to get them to safety, and make sure Dr. Shaw takes care of Emily. Does anybody here have a gun I can borrow? The Secret Service confiscated all of ours.”

Rick blinked. “I was expecting you to ask for an Internet connection.”

“Oh, I’m going to need one of those, too, once we get everybody back together, but first, we have a job that requires weapons.” Steve unsnapped his sidearm and passed it to me. I accepted it before smiling coolly at Rick. “We need to go and kidnap the president.”

“And here my mother said a job in medicine would be dangerous,” said Gregory.

Rick didn’t say anything. But slowly, with an expression of almost painful relief, he nodded.