It had been three weeks since Pullman had met Fango in the SDZ. Those weeks had been the longest of his life. He had swung from wild elation to the depths of inconsolable depression. Even Steve had stopped inviting him to lunch, and his section boss had asked on more than one occasion if he was feeling OK.
All of this had done nothing for his nerves, in the aftermath of the crime he was planning, they would look at who had been behaving suspiciously so surely the finger of suspicion would be pointed at him very early in the investigation.
“It doesn’t matter, I’ll be long gone.” This had been his oft-repeated comforting mantra anytime he was feeling anxious. It didn’t matter if they suspected him after the crime, just so long as he was above suspicion before it. “Which” he reminded himself for the umpteenth time, “of course I am, nobody knows about this apart from myeself and Fango.”
It was early on a Saturday morning when Pullman finally got the message he’d been waiting for. A soft ping somewhere in the distance from his Imbedded Comms Aug had him jumping up out of bed and racing to his terminal.
The message read:
YOU’VE GONE TO MARS NOW TRY JUPITER! JOVIAN HABITATS ARE NOW OFFERING TRIPS TO THE MOST SPECTACULAR GAS GIANT IN THE SYSTEM! !
SKI ON THE GLACIERS OF EUROPA _ AND SPEND THE NIGHTS IN HIDDEN UNDERGROUND ICE CAVES ! WOW !!
OR PERHAPS YOU WOULD LIKE TO TRAVEL TO IO!!!! YES THAT’S RIGHT YOU TOO CAN VIEW THE MOST STUNNING VOLCANOeS IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM ----- COME NOW! ! !
Pullman wondered if Fango had come up with the idea for the code himself. Pullman had to admit that it was a very clever way to communicate secretly. There was indeed a company called Jovian Habitats whom arranged trips to the moons of Jupiter and their marketing was similarly awful.
However the real message was hidden in the few deliberate mistakes in the copy. For instances the spaces between the exclamation marks referred to grid reference points on a map entirely of their own making. So even if somebody did crack the code they wouldn’t be able to apply it to any map they had ever come across.
Pullman sat with a pen and paper and worked out the real message:
BLANKS READY ALL 5 AS ASKED. INVASOMED GOV BDG DELISTED. FLR -8 RM 262. GREEN BELT 35-48-96-2. TOMORROW 2 P.M. EXACT! DON’T BE LATE. SECURITY WINDOW ARRANGED.
Pullman translated and read the message another ten times over just to make sure he had all the information necessary. Then committed the grid coordinates to memory and incinerated the paper message and deleted the Jovian Habitats spam mail.
***
The slight jolt and rise in altitude told Pullman that the air-taxi had left the controlled zones of London, and was now under the guidance of an entirely different air traffic control system. They were heading for a spot to the extreme northwest of the Green Belt.
Pullman looked down at the unfolding landscape and wondered idly when the last time it had actually been green. In a time when his grandfather was a child and ground traffic created pollution, the Green Belt was meant to be some kind of conservationist project. Now though the Belt was synonymous with biofactories and government buildings.
The buildings out here were mainly bubblehabs, the classic kind rather than the type you got in the London CRZ. These buildings were between seventy and ninety percent underground, with just their domed tops showing. Pullman always thought the landscape looked as if an unseen volcano had left behind bubbled lava that had turned to glass and frozen mid flow.
The taxi alerted him to the fact that they were two minutes out from the Invasomed building. He felt his stomach lurch more than usual as the car dropped from three thousand to five hundred feet in a little over a few seconds.
As he approached the entrance to the building he could feel his heart pounding in his chest. Pullman used one of his cheap augs to stimulate his hypothalamus releasing oxytocin into his blood stream in order to calm himself down. He waited until the small readout at the bottom left of his vision read 14:00 hrs and tried the door. Sure enough Fango’s security window worked and he sailed through the building like he was meant to be there.
FLR -8, RM 262 in the coded message referred to where the clones would actually be waiting for him. Pullman now made his way over to the magno-lift and took it down to the eighth level. His step quickened as he exited the lift, a small sheen of sweet played across his palms. He wondered briefly how much Fango’s calm aug would have cost him. Pullman was sure that Fango's aug would have worked perfectly, not allowing any anxiety at all to leak into his consciousness.
He was finally at the door he needed to be at, room 262, he took a deep breath and extended his hand to the DNA-lock. His ID registered as one of the government employees who worked in the building. Pullman was sure that this was just another display of Fango’s power, as far as Pullman was concerned it was impossible to fool a DNA-lock. The soft ping and the picture of the anonymous employee that appeared briefly on the face of the door, told him otherwise.
Pullman stepped inside the lab. It took him precisely twenty seconds to spot the huge cloning vats in the far corner of the room. He made his way over to them, slightly aware that his pace was slowing the closer he got.
Finally he reached the vats, he noted that they did not belong in this room though they were completely hooked up and fully functional. He took a deep breath and approached the first one of the tall upright cylinders. Pullman placed his hand on the access pad to the left of the vat and waited.
After less than a second the vat beeped into life, the door hissed as it spun round back into the casing. The cryogenic gasses keeping the body cool swirled and misted around the clone’s face. As they cleared, Pullman was left looking at his physical double. He stood there for what seemed like minutes just staring at his clone wondering not for the first time if he could live with the ethical implications of what he was about to do.
“Ah well fuck it, too late to back out now. Come on then Jason number 2, let’s get you loaded up and prepped.”
As he pulled out the small grey box containing the copies of his consciousness, he looked into the face of his clone. Pullman the words of Dante filling his mind once again. He spoke them out loud to no one in particular.
“Do not be afraid; our fate cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.”
He reached out his hand and stroked the smooth cheek of his clone. Then without further ado set about making an edited copy of himself.
Title image: Víctor Vázquez on Unsplash