[Secret Project] Chapter 1

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Author's note: So here it is. The start of what I'm expecting to be a new stand-alone novel, tentatively named Dupes. You may see some ideas in common with Undermind, but I plan take this in a different direction, and at this stage I don't intend any crossover between the two projects.

At the moment, I'm still finding my way with this story. It's very early in development. Characters and worldbuilding are still in flux, so I'd appreciate any critiques/comments you can give that might help shape it.

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Dupes Chapter 1: Out of Phase

On a brisk winter night in late July of the year 229 AS, I made a startling discovery. An errant thought was all it took, and my life changed forever. Or rather, one of my lives. The other one…well, we’ll get to that later.

The night began innocuously enough. Stepping out of the Rochamble Academy of Technology metrocable station at 11 pm, I dodged the usual flurry of departing students and made my way up the hill to the twisting towers of the Mechineering Institute. For the past year and a half, I’d spent nearly two thirds of my waking hours within those crumbling concrete walls.

The dusty streets and overgrown parks of the inner campus were relatively empty tonight. Just a few dozen students gathered in quiet clusters around the Corkscrew Drinkery, and the odd straggler heading home after a long day. Pod the guard poodle strained against her leash, desperate to lick my face off. Evading her with face still intact, I nodded up at Larry the watchman as he lumbered by in his rickety old patrol mech. He gave a crisp salute. Once a marine, always a marine.

Arriving at the tower labelled Experimental Mechineering, I stopped to greet the hulking steel monstrosity guarding the door.

“Please present your ID badge!” chirped Gimmick the sentry bot, leaning forwards to shove his camera in my face.

I dutifully held my badge to the robot’s scanner, which beeped and gave off the green glow of approval.

“Please present your ID badge!” repeated Gimmick.

“I just did, and you accepted it,” I said.

“Please present your ID badge!”

I tried again. Still green.

“Please present your ID badge!”

Shaking my head at the useless heap of junk, I waved my badge over the door scanner, and entered the keycode. Yeah, we didn’t call him Gimmick for nothing. Four steel feet clattered against the pavement as the robot turned to follow me, lurched drunkenly to the side, spun, and walked into the wall.

“Please present your ID badge!”

I could still hear him demanding credentials from the wall when I stepped into the Human Augmentation Research Laboratory, three stories up. It was dark, so I reached for the light switch—

Something cold latched onto my ankle and began to skitter up my leg.

Now, before we continue, let it be known that Fritz Baine is not easily rattled. Fritz Baine also doesn’t usually refer to himself in the third person, but I figured you’d want to know my name, so I just snuck it in there. One of my names. Anyway, as I was saying, I don’t scare easily.

So when this thing proceeded to climb my leg and tap dance across my back, I most certainly did not let out an embarrassing squeal and flail about like a madman trying to get it off me. No matter what you might have heard around campus. I flung the little bugger to the floor, and prepared to lay the stomp on it. My foot came to a halt just a few inches from my attacker. It lay upside down, five metal fingers flexing in the air. Servo motors whirred.

A stifled giggle emanated from the dark recesses of the lab. I flicked on the lights—and found the usual suspects lurking in the corner, looking altogether too pleased with themselves. Jaheem Tuare and Lucienne De Rosa—Lucie to her friends.

“Shit, Lucie!” I growled. “I almost broke your hand.”

“Totally worth it,” Lucie said. She reattached the squirming appendage to the stump at the end of her forearm. “I was testing a new remote control interface. Works like a charm.”

I gave a little shudder. “You two should know that while you’ve been plotting my demise, Gimmick has been having a conniption outside.”

The distant sound of the security bot’s voice filtered through the window. “Please present your ID badge!”

Still chuckling, Jaheem sat down at a control console. “I’ma put the poor guy out of his misery.” Peering into the flickery monochrome display, he typed out the shutdown sequence.

“Please present your—” Gimmick fell silent mid-sentence.

Jaheem and Lucie were fellow postgrad students, and my two closest friends here at the Academy. Or, well, anywhere. We only saw each other for the hour or two each day that our research schedules overlapped. I was fine with that. In my experience, friends were best sampled in small doses.

From my own console, I brought up the latest datasets for analysis. I flicked through the tables and graphs, before sending them to the printer.

“What a waste of paper,” I muttered.

“Beats trying to interpret the data on a tiny 320-by-200 green-screen,” Jaheem said.

“That’s my point,” I said. “Digital display tech has been stagnant since the 170s. That’s over fifty years! Why hasn’t someone invented something better in all that time? It can’t be that hard to render a higher resolution image in colour.”

Jaheem stared at me. “What?”

“Forget it.” Sighing, I went to collect the printouts. I’d tried having this conversation many times before—with a number of highly intelligent people. All of them had looked at me as though I was crazy. It was almost as though they had a mental block or something. They just didn’t get it. Or maybe I was crazy.

Jaheem and Lucie went home together at 1 am. They were night owls, but they didn’t work all night like I did. I typically didn’t get out of the lab until 10 am—sometimes later if I needed to interact with the daywalkers, as I called the nine-to-five crowd.

So why, you may ask, did I have such a weird schedule? There was nothing in my line of research that required me to do it at night. I could work whatever hours I chose, as long as I reached certain milestones on time, and attended the occasional morning seminar or workshop. I chose this schedule because these were my prime hours for getting stuff done. Not only were there less people around to bother me late at night, but I literally couldn’t sleep during the hours most people got their shut-eye. I’d long since decided I might as well make use of the time when I’m most productive.

Most people can readjust to a different sleep schedule with a bit of effort. I couldn’t. My biological clock was hardwired to keep me awake after 10 pm, and nothing I’d tried could shift it. Believe me, I’d tried everything. Sleep therapy. Medication. Hypnosis. You name it. My attempts had earned me nothing but crippling insomnia. So these days I didn’t even try. I slept during the day, and anyone who tried to force me to work normal hours could bugger off.

Now I know what you must be thinking. Sleeps during the day. Can’t sleep at night. He’s a vampire, right?

Wrong.

Vampires aren’t real. Obviously. But aside from that, I don’t possess any obvious vampiric traits. I don’t thirst for blood. I don’t spontaneously combust in sunlight. I have no particular aversion to garlic. Can’t say I’m a big fan of being staked in the heart, so don’t try it. The last guy who did…well let’s just say it was his last missed stake.

Anyway, I didn’t sleep away all the daylight hours—just some of them. I usually got super tired around midday, and I was out like a light by 2 pm.

So yeah, I always knew I was a bit weird. What I didn’t know at the time was that my strange sleeping habits were just the tip of the iceberg.

Here at the Rochamble Academy of Technology human augmentation lab, our research mostly focussed on advanced prosthetics like the one Lucie wore. That thing was one-of-a-kind, by the way. You just couldn’t buy something like that on the open market, and if you could, it would cost far more than an arm and a leg.

So, human augmentation research. Sounds awesome, right? Sadly, it sounds a lot more awesome than it actually was. Most people thought we got to play with cybernetic limbs all day (or all night, in my case). The reality was that most of our time was spent staring at graphs and doodling on whiteboards. I’ll spare you the details of my research, but suffice it to say that it was a lot less hands-on than you probably think…alright, I’ll stop now.

Tonight, though, was one of those rare nights when I needed to gather some real data from an actual prosthetic. In this case, an early prototype twin-leg replacement intended for high performance users—athletes, soldiers and such. Since I was a fine physical specimen in possession of four sturdy human limbs, and I wasn’t in a hurry to hack any of them off, I couldn’t test this prosthetic on myself. Frankly, it wouldn’t be safe to attach an early prototype like this to a living body. Have you ever seen someone’s legs twist around like a pretzel and crush their own head? Because I didn’t want to see it, either.

For situations like these, we had a humanoid robotic frame called Walker. Walker had extendible limbs that could also be detached at various points, so we could swap in prostheses of different sizes and test them safely. We couldn’t use it to test the human side of the cybernetic interface, but that was a long way off for this prototype.

With a name like Walker, you’d expect him to, you know, walk. And he did. But it wasn’t as though I could let him free-range through the lab. Instead, I made use of a fenced-off treadmill, as well as a harness hanging from a gantry that I could use to hoist Walker into the air at a moment’s notice.

Why go to all this trouble, you may wonder? Well let’s just say that one time, a certain someone may have had to shift the furniture around to cover up a Walker-shaped hole in the lab’s flimsy plywood wall.

Unfortunately for me, Walker wasn’t in the harness right now. He stood in the corner, powered off, with his robotic innards hanging out. The innards, I could deal with. Moving him, not so much.

I should’ve asked Jaheem and Lucie to help me lift Walker onto the treadmill. Two people could do it easily enough. One…not so much. I was no slouch, but I wasn’t that strong.

If only there were two of me.

The moment that thought popped into my head, I felt…strange. It was as though I was in two different places at once. Here in the lab, and a small, dark place, pressing in on me from all sides. The feeling was brief, but startling. And when it passed, I wondered if I should call an ambulance, because this was not normal. The feeling didn’t return, so I shrugged and went back to the immediate task of figuring out how to lift this bastard.

With the help of a trolley, a bungee chord and a lot of swearing, I managed to get Walker onto the treadmill and attach his harness.

And that was when the door swung open. How odd. Who other than me would come here at this hour…?

I stared at the man standing in the doorway. He stared back with a dumbfounded expression. We both spoke the same words at the same moment.

“What the hells!?”

The guy had my face. My eyes. My clothes. My everything.

He was me.