Robert Kay watched the video of the dark-haired woman and the blond-haired man walking through the repair center. The woman took her jacket from the convivial redhead with her right hand. Kay sighed. “She always grabs her jacket with her left hand,” he whispered aimlessly.
The door to his office swung open and the redhead walked in, her dark-haired companion following. Jeremy stopped the door from slamming, something Carlyle always neglected.
Kay straightened himself in his chair. “Report.” He paused the video playing on his projector.
“The plan is working smoothly, sir,” Jeremy said. “The unit is performing within standard deviations.”
Kay frowned. Picking up his remote, he rewound the video to the moment when Carlyle handed Heathers her jacket. “She always picks up her jacket with her left hand,” he insisted almost irrationally, with a sort of dreamy cynicism. He picked up his demitasse and sipped at his expresso.
“Remember, ticks and fidgets are mostly physical artifacts, not mental ones,” Jeremy gently reminded him.
“That’s what you said about Rachel,” Kay whispered, almost to himself. Louder, he added, “I hope this time we’ll find out what happened to her.”
“She is also based on Allison's brain activity scan from two months before her disappearance,” Carlyle pointed out, annoyance cutting into her voice. “If Christine and Rachel weren’t enough, what’s going to make Anne any different?”
Kay stared blankly at the paused video, his eyes not leaving Heathers’s dark hair. The sadness in his eyes seemed to suck the life out of the screen. “My dearest Carlyle, did you deliver the line the precise way you did the first time?” he finally asked.
Carlyle took a nervous step back. “To the best of my memory. And you know my memory is—”
“Because Rachel didn’t even investigate the problem! The news coincided this time, but if Anne doesn’t follow Allison’s exact course of action, then it’s not enough!”
Jeremy followed Kay’s gaze to Heathers’s jacket. “Sir, it’s possible that Allison wasn’t—”
“Stop.” Kay threw his fist on the table so hard that the demitasse bounced off and shattered on the ground. “Allison is perfect,” he almost growled in his whisper. “Allison is…” He broke off when he saw tears silently snaking down Carlyle’s face. “What?”
She wiped her eyes, smearing her mascara on the back of her hand. “I remembered… she used to read to me every night…”
The room was dark, damp, the air heavy with mold. She was strapped to freezing cold steel operating table, her body heat dispersing into the environment faster than she could replenish it. Outside of operating parameters.
“There’s nothing more I can do. It knows,” an older man spoke in the darkness.
“But sir, she’s alive,” a female voice protested dramatically. “She’s all we have left of Allison. She’s—”
“This thing is just a shell, Carlyle, nothing more. If it can’t lead me to Allison, I have no use for it.” The stony man took a deep breath. “Jeremy, deactivate it.”
“Yes, sir,” Jeremy said. A figure to her left moved in the dark and the sound of plastic on metal echoed through the room.
“Carlyle…?” she wheezed. It was hard to move in the cold and damp. “Carlyle, is that you?”
A figure to her right moved and she detected the slightest hint of red curls. “Yes, Rachel, it’s me.”
“Jeremy,” the man commanded. “Get on with it.”
Jeremy paused. “Carlyle has a point. Rachel’s alive. She’s a perfectly good gen9 prototype. Why throw her away?”
Rachel began shivering on the operating table, tugging at her restraints. “Carlyle? Carlyle, are you going to kill me?”
“It’s okay, Rachel. Everything’s going to be okay,” Carlyle soothed. “It’s not going to hurt one bit.” She felt a hand in a thermosuit brush her arm. “Don’t worry. It’ll all be over soon.”
“It’s because I broke open my arm, isn’t it? Because the hospital sent me to the repair center? I know you wanted me to do something. I can still do it. Just bring Isidore. Isidore can help me—”
“Isidore is dead, Rachel,” the cold man interrupted. “The first thing we did was scrap that old gen6.”
“NO!” Rachel screamed. “Not my dear Isidore…” She was in so much shock she didn’t realize he’d referred to Isidore as a gen6 instead of a gen5.
“It’ll be absolutely painless,” the man promised, his voice softening a tad. “Jeremy, now.”
“Yes, sir,” Jeremy sighed.
“I’m so sorry,” Rachel cried, the tears freezing on her cheeks.
“So am I, my dear Allison,” Kay whispered. There was one final click from her left and the second gen9 prototype ended in silence.
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