Chapter 75 - The Doppelgänger Protocol
The world seemed to tilt beneath my boots. The scars along my scalp, the phantom ache at the nape of my neck where the heavy braid had once anchored me—it wasn't just trauma. It was hardware.
"No," I whispered, backing away from the glass cylinder until my shoulder blades hit the cold iron rim of an inactive console. "No. I remember my father. I remember his hands smelling of engine oil. I remember the radiator clinking in our flat on 47th Street. I remember falling off my bicycle and scraping my knee when I was nine!"
"You remember what was encoded into the tertiary sector of your occipital lobe," Elena said, her eyes hollow. "Arthur was a genius at narrative design. He knew that for an artificial mind to remain stable, it needed pain. It needed struggle. If you gave a subject a life of luxury, the synthetic synapses decayed within months. But give them grief? Give them hunger? Give them the desperate need to survive? The mind locks in. It hardens."
"Stop it, Mother!" Nicholas roared, lunging forward and grabbing Elena by the lapels of her coat, shoving her hard against the bulkhead. "Look at her! She bleeds! She breathes! She felt every ounce of the agony you put her through tonight! You don't get to erase her humanity with your sick family mythology!"
"I am not trying to erase her!" Elena choked out, clawing at Nicholas’s hands. "I am trying to save what is left of us! You fool! Why do you think Arthur put the Dead Hand switch in the lake? Why do you think this ship surfaced the moment Clara entered the terminal room?"
Before Nicholas could answer, a high-pitched, harmonic chime echoed through the vast chamber.
One by one, the shattered monitors surrounding the central dais flickered to life. Lines of green code cascaded down their screens, accompanied by a sound that made the hair on the back of my arms stand rigid: the rhythmic, mechanical click of heavy scissors opening and closing.
*Snip.*
*Snip.*
*Snip.*
From the shadowed far end of the cathedral chamber, where a darkened gantry overlooked the lower engine works, the sound of footsteps began to approach.
Light, deliberate footsteps. The clicking of high heels on iron grating.
"She’s here," Elena whimpered, her arrogance completely evaporating into pure, unadulterated panic. "The iteration Arthur left in charge of the system. The one that never left the crib."
Out of the gloom, stepping into the dim amber wash of the emergency lamps, walked a woman.
She wore the identical ivory silk wedding gown I had worn hours ago at the Drake Hotel, down to the intricate pearl beading along the bodice. But where my gown was now soaked, torn, and stained with soot, hers was pristine. Her posture was flawless.
And cascading down her back, woven with intricate silver ribbons and reaching all the way to her waist, was a thick, glistening braid of dark hair.
She lifted her head.
The face staring back at me was mine.
Not a resemblance. Not a sibling. It was my face, entirely unlined by sorrow, cold and symmetrical as a marble bust. In her right hand, she held a pair of heavy, vintage tailor’s shears forged from blackened carbon steel.
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"Welcome home, Clara," the replica said. Her voice was an exact duplicate of mine, yet resonance chambers within her chest gave it a strange, metallic polyphony that vibrated inside my eardrums. "You took your time dying."
***
