35
Dr Kelly was adamant that nothing should be signed off until I had seen it and approved it myself. She wanted me to see. And the more excuses I made, the more insistent she became.
“First citizen, this is Albion’s destiny – and your own.”
“Aren’t those two the same thing?” Trying to throw off her balance with an appeal to blind dogma. But Kelly’s sight was clear and her balance wasn’t affected at all. If she hadn’t been so very useful to me, I might have been afraid of her.
As it was, I said yes. Yes, I would come. Not in my pomp and circumstance but alone, my only attendants two of Landsman’s killer mutes. There would have been a massed band if I had allowed one, and a fifty-gun salute. But our glorious crusade was now turned inside out. Instead of carrying the fight through Europe and into Asia, we were defending our own beaches, our own soil. I refused to take anyone away from the front lines to serve my vanity.
Sword of Albion is impressive by anyone’s standards. Bristling with deck guns and missile launchers, but also stealthed down to a 0.00001 per cent emission profile. You’d have to find her to fight her, and once you found her she’d make you wish you hadn’t.
Her storage capacity is measured in the millions of cubic metres. Kelly escorted me through the sub-deck platforms, keeping up a rapid pace because their freight of arms and armour meant nothing to her. But she slowed when we came to the cloning chambers, explaining in minute detail how meticulously she had sampled and mapped and reconstructed my genome. “Weren’t you tempted to tinker?” I asked.
The good doctor smiled – a thin smile, connoting considered thought rather than amusement. “A little, yes. You have a predisposition to anaemia, and your left eye is weaker than your right. But I decided, when all is said and done…”
“What?”
“It’s either you, first citizen, or else it’s not. That’s a binary proposition.”
“It is, doctor. It is indeed.” I returned her smile. I knew I had made the right choice when I set her in charge of the programme, but it’s always gratifying to have an instinctive call confirmed by actual outcomes. “I’m left with a qualm, however. Whether it’s a spermatozoon worming its way into an egg or a nano-loom knitting together amino acids, copy errors are likely to arise. How will you know the clone is perfect? How will you be sure?”
Kelly shrugged as if this was obvious. “The loom has an error rate that’s lower than one in a hundred million base pairs, and quintuple redundancy. That’s to say it measures five times and cuts once. It’s within the bounds of possibility that our gene samples might become corrupted – if they were damaged by hard radiation, for example, or contaminated by certain classes of bio-toxin. In a worst-case scenario, the stored embryos might all of them be riddled with random transcription errors. But even then we have the capacity for repair and the original – you – on file. That’s what we’ll test against. Sword of Albion will go into readiness mode only when you order it. And when I say you, I mean someone who checks out all the way down to genetic base. Nobody can counterfeit that.”
“I imagine not,” I conceded.
“And that brings me to the other half of the equation,” the doctor said. “Please, sit.”
She gestured me to a chair. It looked… unwelcoming. Like a dentist’s chair, but with something of the electric variety about it too. Perhaps I was merely responding to the arm and leg straps, which were extremely robust and fit for purpose. I looked round to be sure my two mute bodyguards were still standing close. Even with someone in whom I place an absolute trust, as I do in Dr Kelly, it’s best never to let one’s guard down all the way. “And this is for what?” I said.
Kelly picked something up from a table beside the chair and showed it to me. It was one of the new sense-weave recorders – the same model, as far as I could see, that we use for interrogating enemy prisoners and criminal suspects. “A baseline recording,” she said. “Of your memories. Your thoughts. Your personality.”
“But…” I said. “My clone won’t have any of those things, surely?”
Kelly smiled again, this time with enthusiasm and something akin to delight. “Not initially, no. So he’ll have to acquire them. This device has been modified to my very precise specifications, first citizen. It doesn’t merely record and play back. It overwrites. If you give the subject a sufficient dose of neuro-inhibitors and immune-suppressants, their own memories will gradually fade in the areas of the brain where new memories are being laid down. It will be slow and piecemeal at first, but eventually the clone will inherit your whole life. He will start exactly where you leave off, but with the vigour and passion of youth undiminished.”
I took the sense-weave from her hands and examined it. It was a delicate, even a beautiful thing; as delicate and beautiful as this entire project. “Ingenious,” I said. “But can it work? Implanted memories… they’ve been tried before, with indifferent success.”
“We learned from those early trials, first citizen. We’ve made skinware replicas of your parents, running level five AI constructs of their personalities. They will reinforce the implanted memories through routine and repetition, and at the same time give the clone a reasonable facsimile of your actual upbringing. Well –” She rolled her eyes. “– that is, if you’d grown up on a warship instead of in a London suburb.”
I shook my head in admiration. She had thought this through with astonishing clarity and equally astonishing ruthlessness. “I follow the logic, doctor. At least, I believe I do. In order to take command of Sword, the clone will need to be a perfect genetic copy of me…”
“… and in order to complete your grand design, he’ll need to be a perfect psychological copy. Your doppelganger, not just in the brute arithmetic of base pairs but also in vision and experience and wisdom.”
I nodded. It was an inadequate response, but I had no words suitable to the occasion. The doctor’s eloquence had momentarily disarmed my own. For the first time, and in the space of a few moments, my hopes became certainties. This would work. Whatever the outcome of the current war, all would yet be well. The great scheme to which I had sacrificed my entire life, and countless other lives, was not abandoned but only postponed.
In the crucible of time, the meretricious and the ignoble are by gradual and inexorable process sublimed away.
Albion.
Albion would rise again.
I put the sense-weave on my head. The terminals grew warm at once. The moments of my existence unfolded, as vivid and clear as when I’d experienced them the first time. I lay back and lived them.
36
“Koli!” Cup yelled. “What’s the matter. What’s wrong with you?”
I had gone down on my knees, then on all fours. My head was pressed against the cold metal of the floor. “Re…” I tried to say. “Rec…” The word wouldn’t come out. It was Stannabanna’s word anyway, not mine. Recursion. Inside the memories of his that I was made to remember, he was made to remember memories of his own. Some of that was stuff I’d already got, so it was thoughts within thoughts within thoughts, pressing on each other until my head felt like it had got to break open and my brain spill out.