Constance (Constance #1)(63)
“What did the jury say?”
“Found him guilty in under an hour. It’s being appealed. Makes me think, though. That it would be nice not remembering. Things got real dark there for a while. The army probably still has my last upload in storage. Technically, it’s my property. Sometimes I think it would be nice to not remember any of the things I did in this body. So maybe, I’d go back and start over. Wipe the slate clean.”
“But wouldn’t you risk going through all those same things anyway?”
“I don’t know. Are you going through the same things your original did?”
She thought about her unexpectedly muted reaction to the news of Zhi’s death, especially compared to her original’s. Her total lack of attraction to Levi Greer. It had troubled her at first; she thought maybe it proved that she wasn’t really herself. But maybe that relationship depended on the precise alchemy of those lost days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Love wasn’t a given, it was something that took timing and no small amount of luck.
“Not all,” she said.
“Exactly. But, still, I know I wouldn’t. It took me a long time to block out the people telling me I wasn’t me. But I am Peter Lee. This Peter Lee. It was a hard-earned clarity, and I’m not interested in making another one of me have to learn that same lesson. That’d be a brutal kind of reincarnation, you know what I mean?”
She did and again found herself trusting him. Though she reminded herself that trust shouldn’t extend to Vernon Gaddis. Peter worked for him; they weren’t partners. If Gaddis was behind all of this, keeping Peter in the dark might be useful for winning the trust of gullible twenty-four-year-old musicians. For instance.
“So what are you here to tell me that was too important for the phone?” she asked.
“Mr. Gaddis would like a word,” Peter said, pointing down the street.
“He’s here? In Virginia?”
“That is how it usually works,” Peter said, dry as a fistful of sand.
That shocked her. Gaddis had made it clear that it would take an act of God for him to cross the Potomac. The news hadn’t mentioned any second comings, so she was more than a little curious to know why he was here. Still, the vivid memory of discovering her own body in the farmhouse and of Levi Greer locked in a jail cell for a crime she felt sure he hadn’t committed made her hesitate. The person who had orchestrated that was capable of anything.
“What if I don’t want to talk to him?” she asked.
“I think you’re going to want to hear this for yourself,” Peter said. “But I’m not going to force you to do anything you don’t want, if that’s what you’re asking.”
One of these days, her curiosity was going to get her into serious trouble, and there wouldn’t be a drone handy to get her out of it. She hoped today wasn’t that day as she followed Peter. Her car would park itself after the battery change.
He led her to the parking lot behind an old fast-food burger joint a few doors down. Gaddis might have broken his cardinal rule coming to Virginia, but if anyone thought to cause trouble for him, he’d brought his own private army along to cause a little in return. Flanking an idling limo were two gigantic black SUVs. Unnaturally large men in dark suits formed a perimeter. At least two carried rifles on slings like the ones her father had worn in the pictures with his unit.
“Mr. Gaddis is taking a big personal risk coming down here to see you,” Peter said and held open the door for Con, who climbed inside. Across from her sat Vernon Gaddis and a middle-aged white woman in a severe power suit. She couldn’t have been more than five feet even but didn’t look like anyone to take lightly. She typed steadily on a laptop balanced on her knees and didn’t look up or acknowledge Con.
“This is one of my attorneys, Karen Harper. I asked her to sit in.”
“Does she speak?”
“Where appropriate,” Gaddis said and tapped on the window, gazing up at the logo mounted atop a tall pole overlooking the restaurant. “You like burgers?”
“I’m from Texas,” she said, although, in truth, it had been years since she’d had one. Burgers from a food printer just never tasted right, and most burger chains had either shut down or pivoted to new gimmicks. There were those who decried the decline of the cheeseburger as a tragedy, but most people simply couldn’t afford to pay those kinds of prices for genuine ground beef.
“When I was a kid, there were more than fifty thousand burger places in this country,” Gaddis said. “Every corner, every airport, every ballpark. Burgers, burgers, burgers. As American as apple pie. Now you hardly see them anymore, and it makes me angry and sad. Which is idiotic. I couldn’t tell you the last time I had one. So why do I care so much? Why is it that the more I change, the more I need everything around me to stay the same? It’s a perverse design flaw in our species. That even something as inconsequential as a cheeseburger, which doesn’t affect my life one iota, still threatens my understanding of the world. Ironic, isn’t it?”
“You did invent cloning.”
“Well, your aunt did the inventing, but I sure sold it. I suppose that makes me the Ray Kroc of cloning. I sold America one of the most profound changes in human history and am frustrated and disappointed by the country’s inability to adapt. Yet my feelings are hurt that people aren’t eating enough cheeseburgers. That takes a special kind of hypocrisy, don’t you think? But here we sit, the cheeseburgers of Virginia.”