Second Chances (39 page)

"Your godfather, William Dillinger. He was my college roommate. I hadn't talked to him in years. I went on to medical school while he went to work for the government. We kept in touch, but not as often as I would have liked. His work
 
was apparently very hush hush. He adored you though."

Julie looked at Jason, with a smile on her lips. "You are remembering more and more, aren't you?"

He nodded.

"Then the damage may not be permanent."

"What damage?"

Jason ignored Nathan's question. "He adored you. He called the day after Paige died, I could tell he'd been crying. He told me he might be able to help. He said he knew about my research and wanted me to meet with...with..."

"Doctor Rosenthal," Julie said.

"Yes, Rosenthal. He said our research might compliment each others. With Bill's prodding I left my old life behind and joined a government research project and went to work with Rosenthal."

"What did he do?" Nathan asked.

"He was the cloning expert. He'd been working on cloning for quite some time. Wherever you think cloning technology is at, you'd likely be wrong. He'd been working on cloning organs. Think of it, you need a kidney replaced, clone a new one using your own genetic material. No chance of rejection because it is already you."

Julie wiped absently at the tears at the corners of her eyes. Watching Jason recount the story, as painful as it was for him, filled her with hope.

"They can clone single organs?" Paige asked, astonished.

"No, well maybe now they can. I don't know. But that was what Rosenthal was working on back then, but couldn't get it to work. He moved on to cloning entire beings, which worked. Sort of. He could clone a person almost exactly. And we aren't talking embryos, but fully developed beings. I won't even pretend to say I understood any of it. I suppose in a way it was almost the same as what I was doing with copying the brain. Anyway, he could grow an entire person, but they always died."

Before either Nathan or Paige could ask a question, Jason said. "It was the brain factor. He could clone and grow an exact physical duplicate, but the brain is a huge part of what keeps a person alive. Say what you will, but the will to live exists and it exists in a functioning mind. His clones lacked that. He could grow an exact duplicate, but the brain growing in that body didn't possess the knowledge or have the will that a person develops over their lifetime. His clones, they were just shells really, empty husks. For whatever reason, his cloning process was not able to clone the memories of a person. That is what I was able to provide. Kind of."

"Kind of?" Nathan asked.

"For Paige," Julie said. "The detailed scans he had from her. They worked on her for a very long time. It took them three years, but they did it. They made a clone and via trial and error they were able to map the memories he had saved onto that clone."

Nathan slammed on the breaks. He'd been so engrossed in the story he hadn't noticed the street light turn to red until the last second. Julie slammed into the dashboard, while both Jason and Paige were restrained roughly by their seatbelts.

A horn blared at them from the blue Honda Civic that zoomed in front of them.

"Sorry, are you okay?"

Julie rubbed her right arm and grimaced. "Should have been wearing my seatbelt."

"Sweetheart..."

"I'm okay, Jason."

"Are you sure?"

She nodded. The light turned green and Nathan eased off the brake. Julie slipped her seatbelt on.

"So it worked?" Paige asked.

"Yes and no. Or rather yes, but too well," Jason responded.

"What does that mean?" Nathan asked, afraid at what the answer might be.

"The memories. She had them all."

Paige's brow wrinkled in confusion.

"All of them," Jason stressed. "I took the scans after the fire. She remembered everything. She remembered being nearly burned to death. We tried everything to get her to deal with it. Hypnosis, therapy, you name it. In the end she couldn't deal with it. It was too much."

"She killed herself," Nathan said softly.

Jason nodded.

"Those articles on the website you sent us to. You tried again and again, didn't you?"

Paige gasped. "They all killed themselves? I'm going to..."

"No," Jason said forcefully. "No. The first Paige did. She couldn't handle the memories. I was ready to give up after that. I had lost my daughter twice, I didn't think I could handle anymore. But a new manager joined our project and he somehow convinced me to stay on and give it another try. He was very charismatic and he brought in new people to the project that he insisted could help. His name was Cameron Kassar. It was his notion to manipulate Paige's memories. So after another couple of years or so Paige was alive again. We'd developed a new life for her.
 
I thought it best to erase myself..."

"You what? You thought it was best for me to think you were dead?"

Tears ran down Jason's face. The venom of Paige's word stung harder than any physical blow she could have landed.

"For myself. Best for myself. I am sorry. I couldn't handle it again. I intended to watch from afar. Paige would be alive again and that would be enough for me. I am sorry, but I was too weak to go through it again. I see how stupid that is now. I saved myself nothing and it only served Kassar's agenda. Heck, I think it might even have been his idea."

"What happened?" Nathan prodded.

"It worked. Seemed like it worked perfectly, anyway. Paige was alive and all seemed well. Cameron had used some of his other experts to sculpt Paige's memories."

"Sculpt?"

"Yes, they used a variety of techniques to alter Paige's memories until she had a bit of fantasy mixed in with the facts."

"But she killed herself as well?"

Jason nodded to Paige.

"So it didn't work," Nathan said.

"I...I guess not." Jason frowned and rubbed his chin.

"No, it did. She didn't kill herself willingly."

"What?" all three of them asked Julie.

Julie looked at Jason and saw the confusion in his eyes.

"So, you still haven't remembered it all."

He shook his head. She reached out and took his hand again.

"Paige, was...well murdered I guess is the best way to say it. It was Cameron. His aim for Jason's project was radically different from what he originally stated it was."

"What was the original aim?" Nathan asked.

"Well, like Jason said, it was ability to clone organs for people who needed transplants, but that didn't work out. The full person cloning though, that really got the government's interest. Think about being able to clone the president if need be. Fear of assassination becomes a thing of the past. What if there was another Einstein? You'd never have to lose his brilliance, you could keep transferring his intellect into a new body when the current one wore out."

"Monstrous," Jason said with a shudder.

"Monstrous? But you were the one doing it," Nathan insisted.

"I was trying to save my daughter...I"

"Don't judge him," Julie said harshly. "Until you've experienced his loss, don't you..."

Nathan held up a hand in surrender. He nodded. He thought about how he felt after Paige had died. He'd have done anything to get her back.

"But that wasn't what this Cameron guy was doing, was it?" Paige asked.
 

"What was he trying to do?" Jason asked to himself as much as to Julie. His brow was furrowed in deep thought. He knew the information was locked somewhere in his mind, but he couldn't access it.

"It was a long time before I learned this, but he really wanted to swap people out in society. He originally was hoping Rosenthal would be able to increase the speed of his cloning process. However, as much as Rosenthal tried, it was never going to be as fast as Cameron wanted."

"Wait, what do you mean swap people out?" Nathan asked.

"Okay, imagine this. You have a big world meeting or summit. During the days of that meeting you snag a world leader and replace him with a clone. You now have control of that person. He or she is an exact copy, has all the memories, yet will follow your commands."

"You are talking about some type of a Manchurian Candidate scenario," Jason said.
 

"Yes, but it didn't work. Rosenthal couldn't speed the cloning process to anything even remotely close to what would be needed. And you either couldn't or wouldn't duplicate the process of mapping and transferring memories on other people."

"I'm not following," Nathan said and Paige nodded in agreement.

"Cameron wanted to be able to grab a person and over the course of say a weekend, replace them with his puppet. An exact duplicate but with embedded commands that would allow him to steer the person's actions. But the cloning process, as quickly as it was, was still way too slow and no one could figure out how Jason managed to record memories. Even working with all of his notes, no one could figure out the initial mapping process. There were parts of the process that only Jason knew, that he kept to himself. Paige had been the only person he'd ever done a complete scan on. Paige's memories were the only ones they could get to transfer and take. Once Jason discovered what he had done with the second Paige clone, he refused to be a part of the project anymore."

"Cameron killed Paige?" Jason asked. He rubbed his forehead, struggling to remember.

Julie nodded. "You overheard him discussing it with one of his scientists. She was a test case. While altering her memories to forget about you, to forget being trapped in the fire, they had embedded in her some commands and he'd triggered them causing her to kill herself. He wanted to see just how far he could control a person. Could he get a person to kill themself? To kill others? Even people they loved? "

Tears again ran down the old man's face.

"It wasn't your fault. You didn't know what he was up to. Most of us didn't."

Nathan looked in the rearview mirror and saw Paige had gone pale.

"Paige? Paige, are you okay?"

She shook her head no.
 

Nathan slowed the car and pulled off to the side of the road.

"Will...will I? The others. They killed themselves. They killed their families. Those news articles, I saw them. Will I do the same thing? Have I been programmed? Am I...a time bomb?"

"No," Julie said quickly. "I don't think so."

"How do you know?"

"He rushed you," she said. "I don't know exactly what he had planned for you. I have been way out of the loop for a very long time, but I still hear things. I believe the final work, your final...programming as you called it, was supposed to be done out in California. I know he had plans for you and honestly shudder to think what they might have been, but I do know you were rushed."

"Rushed? A defective product, rushed to market," Paige spat out.

"Don't say that," Jason said.

"Why not? It's true, isn't it."

"No, it ..."

"Yes, Dad, it is," she snapped.

Jason flinched at her words and Paige saw the hurt in the older man's eyes. She wanted to apologize. She hadn't meant to hurt the man, but she knew she had. She was angry, scared and confused. It was too much.

"I...can we get a drink?" She dropped her head into her hands. "I need something cold. Please."

Nathan looked at Julie who nodded.

"Okay." He put the car back into drive and they rode on in silence for another ten minutes until he pulled into the parking lot of a Shell gas station.

"Be right back." Nathan hopped out of the car and returned a few minutes later with a small bag with cold bottles of water and a large cherry slush drink, which he handed to Paige. She gave him a weak smile and thanked him.

Julie got out of the car and helped Jason out. She commented that she was going to help Jason stretch his legs and together they began to slowly walk away from the car and toward the darkened side of the building. Nathan could hear them softly talking, Julie trying to soothe Jason.

Paige got out of the car and leaned on the open door, slowly sipping at her drink.

"Better?"

She shrugged.

"You aren't going to...you know."

"I'm not? How can you be sure? How can she be sure? All those news articles. I am sure those Paiges' didn't think they were going to...going to do what they did."

"I just know."

"Did you think your Paige was going to kill herself?"

She immediately regretted her words. She watched Nathan stumble back a step as if physically struck.

"You aren't going to," he said again, but this time it was only a whisper.

"I wish I was so certain. I don't even know what I am. I mean I am not even human, am I?"

"What the hell are you talking about? Of course you are."

"I wasn't born, Nathan. I was fucking grown. My memories aren't my memories, they aren't even completely real. How the hell can I trust myself when I can't trust my memories?"

"I don't know what to say. What I do know is...that I think I love you."

"You only think that because I remind you of your wife."

"No," he said with a soft laugh. "You definitely aren't the Paige I was married to. I admit that was my original attraction, but I came to realize long ago that you definitely aren't my Paige."

Paige laughed. "Long ago? We've known each other only days."

"But it sure as hell feels a lot longer, doesn't it."

She laughed again and nodded.

"I knew you weren't my Paige from almost the first day, when we first had breakfast."

She looked at him, the question clear but unvoiced.

"The way you ate your toast. My Paige...it just wasn't right. That was the first of many differences I saw. I admit I wanted to be wrong at first. I wanted to believe it was amnesia or something, but it definitely became clear that you were not her."

He stepped closer and gently placed his hand on her chin, turning her until she was looking into his eyes.

"I'm serious, Paige. I can't say I understand what the hell this all is or if I will ever be able to get my head around it all, but I know how I feel."