[Secret Project] Chapter 3

Dupes Chapter 3: M3

I didn’t know what I was, or whether I was even a real person, but holy shit, this was exciting!

When we first determined that the other Fritz was most likely the original, and I was the copy—a clone or android or transdimensional traveller or whatever—I was more than a little freaked out. But shock and existential terror soon gave way to that wonderful feeling I experienced whenever I read a great science fiction novel or learned about a fascinating new scientific discovery. My mind was expanding, and I was seeing the world in an entirely new light.

The petty drama that dominated people’s lives were insignificant compared to this. Either there really was a multiverse, or someone had the ability to not only make a lifelike physical copy of Fritz Baine, but duplicate his mind as well. Sure, I might vanish or pop into another dimension at any moment, but as long as I was here, I wanted to explore this stack of turtles and see how far down it went.

First, it was time to get an omniscan. These kinds of medical check-ups were cheap to perform, widely available, and largely automated. An omniscan could identify all sorts of injuries and illnesses that might require further attention from a doctor. Broken bones, dietary deficiencies, cancer. You name it, and omniscan could find it. All you had to do was walk into a clinic and request one. Better yet, you could do so with complete privacy. Not even doctors or clinic staff would see the results unless you gave them permission. Some people even had scanners in their own homes, but I wasn’t that rich.

Privacy was paramount for me, because if a doctor saw, say, a bunch of circuitry and blinking lights under my skin, both of us Fritzes would find ourselves up shit creek. We wanted to know what I was, but we didn’t want anyone else to know. Not yet, anyway.

Returning from the clinic, I delivered the good news to my fellow Fritz. “I’m perfectly healthy. And human. I’ve got all the right bits in all the right places.” I handed over the omniscan printouts, which indeed showed that I was a normal—albeit exceedingly impressive, if I do say so myself—human specimen.

“Alright,” he said. “Assuming the scan didn’t miss some more subtle oddity, that narrows the list of possibilities down to…what, parallel dimensions or human cloning?”

“Those would be my best theories, yeah. If we’re willing to risk discovery, we could get our genes sequenced. Both to verify that we’re genetically identical, and to find any telltale markings of a clone—shortened telomeres, for example. There may be a faster check, though…”

Fritz thought about it for a moment, then snapped his fingers. “Fingerprints!”

“Bingo,” I said. “There’s a large genetic component to the formation of fingerprints, but they’re also shaped in the womb. So if I’m a vat-grown clone, our fingerprints would be slightly different, just as they’re different for identical twins.”

“Identical twins don’t share identical memories, though,” he pointed out. “Nor do any clones I’ve ever heard of. Clearly you aren’t the product of any publicly known cloning technology. Whoever did this might be able to duplicate my fingerprints as well. Then there were our clothes and the items in our pockets. Cloning doesn’t explain how or why those got duplicated.”

“There are some holes in the clone theory,” I conceded. “But let’s not jump to conclusions. We should gather more data first, and see where it leads us.”

We managed to take reasonably clean fingerprints using the graphite from a pencil I still kept in my desk and never used, until today. I held the prints up to the light, then overlaid them on top of each other. A perfect match.

“Alright, so you’re a more perfect copy than I’d expect from a vat-grown clone,” he said.

I grinned at him. “Aw, you think I’m perfect?”

“More perfect than the poor freaks they’re spawning in the Audorean labs,” he said. “Still nothing close to the perfection that is me.”

“Yep, you just go on thinking that, mate.”

There were more things we could try, but they would have to wait. Mid-afternoon was fast approaching. Past my usual bedtime.

I got the couch, of course, seeing as this wasn’t actually my apartment, and we sure as shit weren’t gonna share a bed. Sleep took some time to come to me. Normally, I had no troubles with insomnia as long as I didn’t try to sleep late at night, but this had been a super strange day. After tossing and turning for what seemed like hours, I must have eventually drifted off into the land of nod, because I awoke to the sound of a creaking floorboard. It was the other Fritz heading into the kitchen for his wakeup coffee.

“Look at the time.” He pointed at the clock on the wall.

I looked. Then I blinked and rubbed my eyes, and looked again. “That can’t be right,” I muttered.

But a glance at my watch told me the wall clock really was telling the truth. It was a quarter past twelve at night.

Waking up just after midnight may not seem strange to you, but for me, it was almost as weird as finding out I wasn’t the real Fritz. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d slept in this late. I was hard-wired to wake up by 10 pm. Or so I thought.

“It’s not just you,” the other Fritz said. “I woke up late as well.”

“It could just be that we’re super wound up after yesterday’s mindfuckery,” I said. “Or…”

“It could be a side effect of whatever produced you,” he said, finishing my thought. “If something scanned my brain and copied my memories to you, it could have changed me as part of the scanning process. In ways I wouldn’t even be aware of.”

“That’s a big leap, but yeah, it’s possible, I suppose.”

“It feels too early to be having this discussion,” he said. “I’d better head back to the lab today, or I’ll get behind in my research.”

“Alright. I may not be here when you get back. Once the rest of the city wakes up, I’ll go knock on some doors, see if anyone wants to hire me for some shift work.”

“Sounds good. Before I go, we should come up with a name and cover story for you, in case we ever need to explain why there’s two of me.”

“Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “From now on, I’ll be Fred Baine, your long-lost twin brother.”

“That could work. Now about how you came to be living here…”

We quickly hashed out a fake history for me, so we could keep our story straight. It probably wouldn’t hold up to intense scrutiny, but we could iron out the details later.

“Alright, I’m off,” Fritz said. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“Woo! Hookers and soma, here I come!”

Twenty minutes after he headed out the door, I called Jaheem at the lab. “I’m running late today, and I can’t find my badge. Could you let me in at the—oh wait, found it. Never mind.”

“Bro, you left Walker unplugged all night and drained the battery,” he complained. “Not cool.”

“Bugger, sorry mate,” I said. Actually, it had been Fritz who must have forgotten to hook the robot up to his charger, not me, Fred. But I wasn’t about to tell him that. “Anyway, I’ll see you in a minute.”

“A minute my arse,” he muttered. He could see that I was calling from my—from Fritz’s—apartment number, and he knew as well as I did that it took at least twenty minutes to get to the lab from here.

“Oh, you’d be surprised how fast I can move when I need to,” I said mysteriously.

“Whatever, bro. I expect you to—what the shit!?” His voice became distant as he spoke to a certain someone who had just entered the lab. “Fritz? How did you get here so fast?” He spoke into the phone. “You’re not Fritz. Who the hells are you, and what are you doing in his apartment?”

I ended the call, grinning ear to ear. Fritz would have some explaining to do, lest Jaheem call the enforcers to investigate a possible break-in at this apartment. But the bafflement in his voice had been priceless.

Scanning newspapers and Academy newsletters for job ads, I found few that suited me, but that was no surprise. There weren’t many jobs that would make use of my mechineering expertise in this city, and if I applied for those, people from the Academy might find out, and ask all the wrong questions. Best to go for something unremarkable for now.

I booted up my wordstation, and set to work fudging my resume. Don’t look at me like that! I was mostly removing Fritz’s qualifications and experience, not adding them. Mostly. I didn’t want to reveal any Academy affiliation to potential employers, and there were some gaps to fill.

I printed some copies of my resume to send to prospective employers, but I was well aware most of those would end up in the trash without so much as a dismissive glance. Most jobs came from people you knew, and no-one knew Fred Baine. I’d get better results going door to door.

Thirty three doors was all it took. A freight company at the harbour called Quick-Load Shipping was so desperate for new service mech operators that they were willing to hire people who didn’t hold a current mech license. I didn’t have a license, but I knew my way around the lumbering machines. We had one of them at the Academy’s Mechineering Institute—an old TZ570. A certain group of students who shall remain nameless had illegally retrofitted it with saw blades and flamethrowers for use in this year’s Mechageddon competition. I’d taken the monstrosity for a spin on more than one occasion, and damn it was fun!

The site was run by a man named Mohinder Giri, but he asked me to call him Moh. Moh didn’t so much as glance at my resume. All he seemed to care about was whether I could demonstrate that I could pilot a TZ690 service mech. This model was newer than the TZ570 I was familiar with, but the control layout was nearly identical. Sitting in the auxiliary seat beside me, with his hands resting on the override controls, Moh asked me to load some crates onto a cargo ship moored at the nearby wharf.

After the third crate, he’d seen enough.

“Job is yours if you want it, kid,” Moh said. “Pay is forty crowns an hour. Cash. All you have to do is haul freight and keep your mouth shut about anything you see here. We good?”

Forty crowns an hour was a very generous rate for casual work—even for night shifts. I wasn’t so sure about that last part, though. Why would he care if I told anyone what went on here? It wasn’t as though I’d be dealing with any trade secrets, would I? But I needed the money, and my options were limited. Best to just go along with it for now. If I saw anything too dodgy, I could always just quit.

I shook his hand. “Sounds good to me.”

My first shift started that night. I didn’t notice anything dodgy, aside perhaps from the armed security guys out front. Such measures seemed a little over the top for warding off petty thieves, but then, this was Rochamble. We had a bit of a problem with violent crime.

It wasn’t long before I settled into a routine, and the novelty of the job began to wear off. At times I found myself wondering idly if I could add a flamethrower to this bucket of bolts.

“Step it up, fellas!” Moh bellowed later that morning. “Newbie’s making the rest of you look like amateurs.”

Oh great. Just what I needed. Now all the other workers would resent me for being too awesome. I made a show of fumbling the next crate, catching it at the last second before it shattered on the deck.

“Careful!” Moh warned. “You drop it, you pay for it.”

“What, really?” The goods inside these crates could be worth thousands of crowns.

“Not really. But I’ll show you the door faster than you can say, ‘Sorry, Moh.’”

“Pretty sure I’d use more colourful language than that,” I said.

He laughed. “You’ll fit in well around here, kid. Don’t screw it up.”

I didn’t screw it up. For three whole weeks.

My colleagues seemed like good guys, if a bit rough around the edges, but occasionally I saw or heard something that would set off alarm bells in my head. People would arrive unannounced in the night, often armed and with aggressive demeanours—often getting into heated arguments with Moh. Once, he pulled a gun on them, and they backed away with their hands in the air. Several times, someone spoke a name that sent shivers up my spine.

M3.

If that name doesn’t give you goosebumps, you’ve probably been living under a rock your entire life. But for all those those rock-dwellers out there, here’s a bit of background.

There are many kinds of do-badders in this world. Megalomaniacal dictators, insane cultists, terrorists and serial killers are a quarter crown a dozen. But the worst of these—or at least the ones everyday people on the streets of Rochamble fear the most—are the syndicates.

A steadily escalating arms race between enforcers and criminals has done little to stamp out crime. Instead, the criminals have banded together into ever larger, more organised, more well-funded, and more ruthless enterprises. Some of these organisations hold enough wealth and power to rival small nations. Some have taken over small nations. Most are not driven by political, ideological or religious beliefs. Nor do they want to see the world burn, like some nut jobs out there. They simply want to make money by any means necessary. Assassinations, narcotics, grand heists, human smuggling—you name it, they profit off it. These criminal enterprises are known by different names in different places, but around these parts, the most common one is…you guessed it, syndicate.

M3 is one such syndicate—one of the most powerful, although not the largest. Like many multinational syndicates, M3 has carved out a niche on the black market: they are the arms dealers of the criminal world.

Being one of the most infamous syndicates operating in our neck of the woods, M3’s name comes up fairly often in everyday conversation. So hearing it from a colleague’s lips wouldn’t ordinarily arouse suspicion. But coming from guys who looked like syndicate thugs? Yeah, more than a little concerning.

It was early in the morning of my sixteenth day on the job, when it truly dawned on me that this was not an ordinary freight company. The moment of realisation came when I went to pick up a large crate, only to notice that it was cracked. Inspecting the crate more closely, I caught a peek of its contents—and immediately wished I hadn’t. Those were military-grade weapons inside. Outside of armed international conflicts, guns like those were only used by enforcers—and well-equipped syndicates.

Moh cuffed me over the back of the head. “You didn’t see that. We clear?”

“Didn’t see what?” I said.

Giving me a curt nod, he set to work boarding up the split in the crate.

It was an especially rough night. There was a howling gale outside, and the sea was surging. But it seemed we’d be loading crates all the same. Moh insisted that there’d be no delays. Even if I wanted to report what I’d seen to the enforcers—which I kinda didn’t, because that would attract far too much attention from the wrong people on both sides of the law—it wouldn’t be happening tonight.

The deck of the cargo ship was not my favourite place to be right now. It was a constant struggle to maintain balance with the raging storm buffeting my mech—more so when holding bulky, top-heavy crates. But I wasn’t the one who lost his balance. It was Bertram, one of the other junior workers. A powerful gust of wind knocked his mech off its feet as he came up behind me. The crate he’d been carrying smashed into my mech’s shoulder, sending me staggering sideways. And just like that, I went tumbling over the rail and into the roiling waters below.

I was in pitch darkness, with ice-cold water pressing in on me from all sides. Something was wrong with my leg, and my lungs were heaving in voiceless agony. I shakily undid the straps holding me to the submerged mech, only to find that my leg was caught.

Fumbling in the darkness, my hands traced over ripped clothes, torn flesh—and the bent metal frame that had my leg in a pincer grip.

I was going to die.

It took me perhaps another twenty seconds to fully appreciate that fact. Then my lungs seized up and I died.