Constance (Constance #1)(64)
“I got the impression you’d never set foot here again,” Con said.
“There have been developments.”
“What developments?”
“I want you to come back to the island with me. It’s not safe here.” Gaddis paused and corrected himself. “Well, it was never safe, but now it’s way beyond that.”
“I have things left to do. I’m not finished here.”
“We had a deal. You wanted to know what happened to your original. Now you do. The police have a suspect in custody. What’s left?”
“Levi didn’t do it.”
“Levi?” Gaddis said, seemingly surprised to hear her use his first name. “The husband had ample motive, opportunity, and the details of the crime are very personal to him. The fact that he has a childhood connection to that farm is damning. There’s also a surplus of evidence against him. The murder weapon, for one.”
“How exactly do you know all that?” Con demanded. According to Clarke, none of it was public knowledge yet.
“I’m worth three billion dollars,” Gaddis said, deeming it a more than adequate explanation. Con supposed it was—that kind of money bought access to almost anything. Or anyone. Buying Laleh Askari a clone for her brother would be pocket change to Vernon Gaddis. He could also know all this because he had framed Levi Greer and needed Con to believe the lie.
“How nice for you,” Con said.
“But I don’t need a fortune to know it’s not safe for you in Virginia. So give me one good reason why you wouldn’t come back to Maryland with me?”
“Because my original was murdered to activate me. Levi Greer was framed so there would be someone to blame. It was either Fenton or it was you. You both want whatever’s in my head. That much is obvious, even though you both get cute about it and won’t just tell me what it is.”
To her surprise, Gaddis laughed to himself as if realizing his predicament. “So because I need your consent to make an upload of your consciousness, the more I offer my help—”
“The less I trust you. Yeah, that’s about it.”
Gaddis took a moment, weighing his options. He glanced at his lawyer, who nodded. Then he said, “The scan we took before you left. I have the results.”
“And?” Con didn’t much like the way his voice had deepened.
“When Brooke told you about seeing a cluster of voids in the log of your download, it jogged my memory. One of the projects that Abigail was working on at the time of her death was a technique for inserting accessible data into an upload. Augmented consciousness, she called it. Instant expertise.”
“I’m sorry, that sounds like science fiction to me,” Con said, aware that was ironic coming from a human clone.
“Half of science these days is finally catching up to the whims and dreams of writers from the 1950s,” Gaddis said. “Theoretically, it should have worked. The brain has plenty of unused space, but Abigail could never make an effective addition without corrupting the download and causing fatal complications in the host brain. For complex reasons, the sensors that logged downloads couldn’t interpret Abigail’s augmentations, and they read as empty space. A cluster of voids, if you will.”
Con drew in a sharp breath, catching on. “Which would mean you were right. My aunt didn’t delete her research.”
“Which brings us back to Brooke Fenton,” he said with the disdain usually reserved for rare cancers. “She was the only person to confirm this so-called erasure. My guess is when she realized the scope of Abigail’s research, she decided to hide it and claim Abigail destroyed it before her supposed suicide. It’s been right there all this time. Brooke has simply been biding her time for the opportunity to tiptoe it out.”
“But why would she steal from her own company?” Con asked.
“Because no one makes movies about the Tim Cooks of this world.”
“Who’s Tim Cook?”
“The CEO of Apple after Steve Jobs died. Did a damn fine job too. But it was never his company. Brooke always aspired to a Steve Jobs kind of greatness but knows now she’ll never have it. I think she’ll be looking to sell to the highest bidder. The Chinese would be my guess. They’ve been playing catchup for ten years and would give Brooke the deed to Hong Kong Island for Abigail’s research, since it would certainly leapfrog them past anything we have currently.”
“So Brooke Fenton murdered Con D’Arcy so that I could carry Abigail’s lost research out of Palingenesis in my head. I really am her unwitting courier, just like you said. And that’s this cluster-of-voids thing in my head. Do I have that about straight?”
Gaddis handed her a tablet. “That and it’s killing you.”
Wonderful. She scrolled slowly through the doctor’s analysis of her scan. Much of it was technical, but Con understood the bottom line. She came to an image of her scan; beside it for comparison purposes was the scan of a neurotypical download. Hers was much darker, with slashes of empty space. The cluster of voids.
Gaddis said, “Whatever Brooke inserted has corrupted your download. Your brain is attacking it the way the body might reject an organ transplant.”
“How long do I have?” Con returned the tablet and sunk back, adjusting to the weight of her new reality. She imagined that later she’d have all kinds of emotions about it, but for now, she felt only a spreading numbness. All this time, she’d been fighting for a life that would be no life at all. It felt like a prank, a practical joke scribbled by a lazy, unjust universe. Well, at least now she didn’t have to worry so much about being driven insane by the lag.