The Clone who Didn't Know (The Genehunter)

  The Genehunter #3

  The Clone Who Didn't Know

  Simon Kewin

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks once again to Stephanie Lorée for the invaluable feedback, and for pointing out that Devi is female.

  The Genehunter #1

  The Wrong Tom Jacks

  Simms is a genehunter, paid by megarich collectors to track down the DNA of the famous for their private zoos. He's employed to locate the genetic code of Tom Jacks. But not the rock star Tom Jacks, just an unknown namesake.

  The job bugs Simms. Something about it is wrong. Someone is playing him. Problem is he doesn't know who or why. None of the illegal plug-in technology filling his brain is much damn use. The one person who can help him is an ex-lover, but she's also the one person on the planet who never wants to speak to him again.

  The last thing he needs is Agent Ballard of the Genetic Monitoring Agency pulling him out of the jump network to interrogate him about someone he's never even heard of.

  Someone called Boneyard...

  Volume 1 of the 5 volume Genehunter series. Find out more at Amazon (UK), Amazon (US), Goodreads, simonkewin.co.uk or on Facebook.

  The Genehunter #2

  The Zombies of Death

  Simms begins to uncover the truth about Boneyard. Problem is that nearly gets him badly killed and now he has to walk a line between a bunch of religious fanatics and the GMA who want him to spy on them.

  Meanwhile, just to make life interesting, he’s employed to find the DNA of the members of punk band The Zombies of Death. To do that he needs the help of his old friend, Devi. But she’s gone completely AWOL. And he's finding it hard to concentrate anyway because of what he’s learned about his ex-love, Kelly...

  Volume 2 of the 5 volume Genehunter series. Find out more at Amazon (UK), Amazon (US), Goodreads, simonkewin.co.uk or on Facebook.

  The Clone Who Didn't Know

  Simms plummeted from the top of the stacktower. The cracked, grey concrete of the deserted London street rushed up to greet him like an enthusiastic puppy. As he cartwheeled through the air, arms flailing, his brain plug-ins measured the precise distance to the approaching ground, performed a simple calculation and presented their conclusions to his conscious mind. He had 4.5 seconds to live.

  His main emotion was relief. He’d feel no real pain as he hit; his cranial hardware would see to that. And then all his troubles with Kelly and Ballard and Gideon Jones and the whole damn lot of them would be over. He felt weirdly calm, almost like he wanted it. Was that it? Had he suspected this was going to happen? He should have been suspicious when the client insisted on meeting at the top of a deserted building. Hell, he had been suspicious. Still he’d gone along. Told himself the client had seen too many old movies. He’d made sure the guy was alone, unarmed, yada yada, then like an amateur handed over the DNA he’d been employed to track down.

  And the client, instead of wiring across the money, had detonated the explosive charge he’d rigged, hurling Simms over the side of the building.

  He would have laughed at how ridiculous it all was if not for the rushing air sucking the breath from him. It hadn’t even been a big job. Two hundred K for the DNA of a little-known twentieth century soul diva. It was a doodle, a distraction, a filling in of time. He really was like some rookie no-name starting from scratch. He wondered how much Devi would laugh when she found out. He wondered whether Kelly would laugh or cry.

  His last thought was of a baby girl he’d never met. He guessed she’d never know anything about him now.

  1.5 seconds. His brain shut down as he flew at the ground.

  He was aware of painful white light even with his eyes shut. For the briefest moment he thought he’d made it to heaven after all. Hell, more likely. Or, more likely still, he’d managed once again not to die. A moment of regret washed through him, a sense of burdens being hefted back onto his shoulders.

  He squinted open his eyes, the bright light sharp on his retinas. He could make out the silhouettes of three figures standing around him. No wings or horns on any of them.

  ‘Where am I?’ he asked. ‘Who are you?’

  Hardly his most original opening. He wasn’t at his best. He tried to stand, only to realise he was standing, strapped to some sort of metal frame, arms outstretched, completely immobilised. Jesus, didn’t anyone just sit you down to talk to you any more?

  ‘Hello, Simms.’

  A woman’s voice, not one he recognized. His plug-ins hailed hers for IDs but got nothing. People were so damn paranoid these days.

  ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘So, you saved my life because you wanted the fun of killing me yourself?’

  ‘What makes you think we want to kill you?’

  Simms struggled uselessly against his tight bonds. ‘Seems people keep wanting to.’

  ‘Do you know who we are?’

  Simms squinted but the light was too sharp. GMA? Forty Days? MegaMeta? Could be any of them. ‘You’re trying to sell me life insurance and this is your sales technique. It’s not great, I have to say.’

  He got an ID from her plug-ins then as she opened up enough to let him see who she worked for. He’d been wrong again. It was the other bunch of trained killers out to get him.

  ‘Ah. You’re clONE, not travelling salesmen. Easy mistake to make.’

  His eyes were beginning to work now. The light was still too bright to look into but he could see the square, red tiles of the floor around his feet. They looked familiar for some reason.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘You were walking past that stacktower and caught me? Sweet of you. I’m grateful.’

  ‘You hit the horizontal jump node we’d concealed.’

  ‘So the client, the guy on the roof …?’

  ‘One of ours, obviously. See, we knew all about you but we needed to be sure. We’re not the fanatics people claim.’

  ‘Really? Oh, good. You can untie me and I’ll leave, then.’

  ‘That’s not going to happen.’ Another voice, male, again unknown to Simms. It didn’t really matter who any of them were. They were a clONE death squad and pretty clearly that meant they were going to kill him. What he didn’t understand was why they hadn’t already. What did they want from him? Why the hell did people always seem to want something from him?

  ‘We tested you,’ the man continued, ‘to see if you really would supply the genetic code of Gina Paradiso. So many of your type are incompetent frauds. But you’re for real aren’t you? A genuine DNA Detective, making your living buying and selling people like they’re things.’

  Here it was. The great moral debate. Just what he needed.

  ‘I didn’t sell anyone,’ said Simms, shaking his head. ‘I sold a bunch of numbers, As, Cs, Gs and Ts in a particular sequence. It wasn’t alive. No one died. No one got born for that matter.’

  ‘Is that what you tell yourself? To help you sleep at night?’ The woman again. He could see her features now: dark hair, young face. She’d be pretty if it wasn’t for her angry scowl. Beyond her, plain whitewashed walls. It was hot, too. Damn hot. A dry, desert heat. Lines of sweat trickled down his back.

  He suddenly knew where he was. Did Kelly really hate him so much? This was her answer to all his attempts to get in touch? His whereabouts handed to a bunch of clONE killers?

  ‘Look,’ said Simms. ‘You spend your time defending the rights of clones. So, shouldn’t you be thanking me if I help bring more of them into the world?’

  He didn’t see the fist coming. The woman’s blow crunched into his nose. A brief spike of pain hit him before his plug-ins could smother it. Blood filled his mouth.

  ‘You’re disgusting,’ the man said from behi
nd her. ‘All of you. You think you can treat people as commodities. You’re no better than slave-traders, selling DNA to collectors so they can fill their private zoos with living, breathing people. Do you know what happens in places like that? And do you know what happens to those who don’t make the grade? The mutations? The rejects?’

  Simms shook his head, spat out blood onto the red tiles. ‘I’m not responsible for the actions of others.’

  ‘Then you’re either stupid or self-deluded,’ said the woman.

  Simms shook his head again but didn’t reply. Without looking up, he lashed out with an EM attack plug-in, hoping to overwhelm their defences, inflict some pain at least. He was still going to be strapped to a metal frame inside their compound, no one coming to help him, but it might make him feel better.

  His attack got nowhere. He looked up to see the three assassins watching him, the man shaking his head pitifully.

  OK. They had good hardware, too. No great surprise.

  The third spoke now, another woman, older, her ID also unidentifiable. He figured she was the squad leader, standing there at the back and watching. She had long hair: black or dark brown. From the way she stood - poised, balanced - she must be a street-fighter or a dancer. Maybe she was both.

  ‘Tell me, Simms,’ she said, ‘Do you think about the people who get made from the DNA you sell? Do you wonder what happens to them?’

  He did, of course. What did they think he was? But he had to make a living didn’t he?

  ‘Look,’ said Simms. ‘We’re not going to agree about this. Your job is to hunt down the illegal cloners. Since you seem to include me in that, you’d better get on and kill me now.’

  ‘Maybe that’s what we should do,’ said the woman. ‘But we’re not going to. We’re going to let you live.’

  ‘Why?’

  The woman turned away from him and began to pace the room, as if he’d asked a fascinating question she’d never considered. ‘You are cruel, amoral, pathologically selfish,’ she replied. ‘But there are those in our organization who believe you’re not beyond redemption.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Who do you think?’

  So this was Kelly trying to help him? ‘And what, I stop genehunting and you let me live out my remaining days in peace and happiness?’

  ‘That would be such a waste of your talents. No, we want you to track down someone for us.’

  ‘You want to employ me as a genehunter? Are you fucking kidding? You’re clONE. That’s insane. That’s against every rule you have.’

  ‘Still, we’ll release you on the condition you do this for us.’

  Simms studied the three of them, waiting for the punch line, the sting, the laugh. Nothing came. It looked like they actually meant it.

  ‘Tell me who you need.’

  The man spoke again now. ‘We’re not entirely sure who he is or what he is. He’s definitely alive. We think he’s lost, confused, vulnerable. He may need our help. Here’s the deal: help him and you help yourself.’

  ‘And if I refuse?’

  ‘You know what we really like to do to genehunters,’ said the man.

  ‘I thought I did.’

  ‘And we’ll be watching you, of course,’ said the leader. ‘If you hunt anyone else, even for a molecule collector like Lund, we’ll assume our agreement is at an end and come for you. And next time there won’t be a hidden jump node to catch you when you fall.’

  Was this some game they played before killing their targets? He could make out nothing on their faces and got nothing from their brains.

  ‘OK,’ he said, still expecting them to start laughing at their fine joke. ‘It’s a deal.’

  No one even smiled. Instead, the older woman sent him details on their target. Just like any regular client except for the not offering payment part. He was more used to dealing in musicians than scientists but, hell, he’d take it.

  They untied him and led him outside, through the clashing heat of the Arizona sun to the jump node he remembered from his previous visit. Before he stepped in, he turned to the woman walking behind him.

  ‘Give Kelly a message from me.’

  ‘Kelly?’

  ‘Come on, no games. Just give her the message.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Tell her she needs to reply to me. Tell her I want to talk about Eloise.’

  ‘Who is Eloise?’

  ‘Eloise is none of your damn business. Give Kelly the message and tell her to respond next time I ping, OK?’

  Simms turned and stepped into the node. His last conscious thought was that the world had gone insane if you couldn’t rely on highly-trained death squads to kill you.

  Simms placed the drinks on the table in front of Devi.

  ‘So, couldn’t keep away, huh?’ he said. He sat down next to her in their shadowy corner of the Double Helix. Which wasn’t hard to do because all the corners were shadowy. ‘Or did you blow all your money from Lund on well-endowed fleshbots already?’

  Devi sipped her scotch and smiled at Simms. ‘Had to come and see if you were surviving, didn’t I? You’ve been getting weird on us. Almost moral. Figured you must be ill.’

  Simms knocked back a mouthful of Scotch, thinking what to say. He’d been trying to make some progress on the clONE case for two days and had gotten nowhere. He’d asked her here for help. Not for a lecture.

  ‘I traded you the Zombies of Death DNA for hard information,’ he said. ‘It made perfect business sense.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  Simms sat back, trying to find the right words. The warm bite of the Scotch cushioned him from reality. His plugins reacted by implementing the intoxication-handling rules he'd set up, locking out wild or dangerous behaviour. He let them run. They generally knew what they were doing.

  A gentle hubbub of low voices filled the air in the Double Helix. No one near, no one paying them any attention. Mac standing behind the bar watching over everything like a fond parent. They were safe here. Neutral territory.

  ‘A lot of shit going on,’ said Simms quietly.

  ‘Forty Days. You said.’

  ‘That’s just the start of it, Devi. I got clONE on my back, too.’

  ‘We’ve all got clONE on our backs, sweetheart.’

  ‘Yeah, but I mean literally. A death squad stung me, took me prisoner.’

  ‘Yet here you are, looking more or less alive. Sometimes I think you make all this stuff up.’

  ‘I’m serious. They want me to go over to the fucking light side.’

  ‘You? Come on.’

  ‘Me, yeah.’

  ‘And you gonna do what they want?’

  ‘Maybe. Don’t see I have too much choice. They were pretty persuasive. Figure I’ll give them what they want and keep them sweet, at least.’

  ‘Like you always do.’

  ‘Like I always do.’

  The door to the outside world opened then, and two young genehunters barged inside. Little more than boys, laughing raucously at some private joke, shattering the calm of the bar. Simms didn’t know them. He’d lost track of all the young guns. And you didn’t check out other hunters’ IDs here in the Double Helix. That was the code.

  He looked away. He didn’t need to know who they were; he knew their type well enough. Brash, ruthless, aggressive. No finesse. That was how the kids were these days. Maybe he’d been the same, once, but he’d learned a few things since then. He was willing to bet neither of these punks had been visited by Ballard or Gideon Jones or been snatched by clONE. Maybe if they had they’d be a bit less cocky. He shook his head. They were just children, unimportant.

  He looked back at Devi who was studying him, eyes narrowed. She wouldn’t need brain plug-ins to guess what was going through his mind. They’d known each other nearly ten years. They’d had flings, on and off. Sometimes they were mortal enemies and sometimes they were lovers. On a couple of occasions they’d been both at the same time.

  ‘There’s more, though, isn’t there
?’ she said. ‘You got the religious weirdos and the clone lovers and the GMA all gunning for you, but there’s something else too, right?’

  Simms shrugged. ‘There’s always something else.’

  ‘You’re trying to find the words to tell me you love me?’

  Simms ignored her. ‘See, Devi, I got all these scary groups with guns and shit coming after me, but I understand them. I know how to deal with them.’

  ‘So what don’t you understand?’

  ‘You remember Kelly?’

  ‘How could I forget my rival for your affections? The raven-haired beauty with the liquid eyes. Actually, now I come to think of it, I should have gone with her rather than you.’

  ‘Yeah. Good luck with that.’

  ‘So, you’re not over her. And there she is, on the side of the angels, tearing you in half.’

  ‘No. I mean, yeah, but there’s more.’

  Devi regarded him for a moment. ‘Ah, so there is a baby.’

  ‘You fucking knew?’

  ‘I heard rumours. Not the same thing. It’s yours?’

  ‘So far as I can tell. Which isn’t very far because I can’t get close.’

  ‘And you want to get close? Seriously? I had you down as the sort who’d turn and jump half way round the world. I mean, come on Simms. You’re hardly parent material. You’re hardly a good role model.’

  He sipped his drink, didn’t reply, didn’t look at her.

  ‘Sweet Jesus,’ she said. ‘Simms the loving parent. Maybe Forty Days are right and the end-times are upon us after all.’

  ‘I need to know she’s safe is all. Both of them. I’m a danger to them because of what I am.’

  ‘Someone’s threatened them to get to you?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘And you figure if you keep clONE sweet you can earn access to Kelly and your daughter and make everything better.’