The Replaced(75)

Simon reached for my hand, and even though my heart fully and completely belonged to Tyler, just like it had all along, I let Simon give me this—his comfort, and his strength—because I needed it. I needed it so damn much. “You’re more human than anyone I’ve ever known,” he whispered, and I almost smiled, because usually when people called each other human, they were explaining away making mistakes, so it should have been an insult, him calling me human like that. Except I knew he meant it in the best possible way, so I gave him a quick squeeze in return.

“My father used to tell me about how he first met them,” Griffin said, turning her gaze toward the ceiling, the sky. “Some called them the First Contact meetings, but my father, he just called it ‘the Meeting’ and we all knew what he meant. People think the president was there.” She shrugged. “Maybe he was at some point, but not for the first one.”

The room went silent while she talked; even the computers seemed to hum less noisily, as if her words had suddenly become a physical presence demanding to be noticed, something you could feel and see and taste.

“He said they struck a deal at the Meeting—those scientists, the ones like my dad, and whatever those things were, from wherever they came from. A deal?” She gaped, leveling her gaze on us. “Can you believe that? To trade people for technology.” She gave a peevish shake of her head. “It’s not like we had a choice in the matter, about whether to agree or not. People had already been taken and experimented on, even before then. The agreement only ensured that the government would be compensated—paid in the form of cutting-edge technology—for turning a blind eye to these abductions. They would benefit from this obviously advanced culture.” She stressed the word obviously, making her less-than-generous feelings known.

I felt like I was gonna be sick as I tried to process where I fit in all this. Whether I was supposed to consider myself part of this “advanced culture” now, or if I was still just plain old me.

I thought about how thickheaded I’d been when we’d gone through my dad’s things and I’d seen all those stories about government cover-ups, all the accounts of secret files and covert government agencies, and how I’d scoffed at the very idea. I almost felt stupid for being so close-minded.

“Sounds like your dad got exactly what he deserved.” I didn’t pretend not to know what Griffin had done to him. As far as I was concerned, anyone who was willing to let his own daughter be used as an alien-lab-rat in exchange for some cool gadgets had punched his own one-way ticket to hell.

Griffin didn’t comment one way or the other about her father. “In the end, the deal never worked out the way my dad, or the other scientists and politicians, wanted it to. The ‘technology’ our side was promised wasn’t delivered in the form of ray guns or X-ray glasses or anything like that. The scientists were promised alien DNA that they could experiment on, that they’d planned to learn from. Potentially even harness.” She grinned a wicked grin. “There was only one problem with their plan: we were harder to catch than they thought we’d be.”

I gasped, finally clueing in. “We are the alien technology?” No wonder we were constantly being sought after. Hunted.

She shrugged. “Think about it. Our metabolisms are slower. We need less food and sleep than normal humans, we age ridiculously slowly, and we heal spontaneously. Why wouldn’t we be valuable? What pharmaceutical company wouldn’t pay millions, even billions, to get their hands on a few strands of our DNA? Or even better, what government wouldn’t kill for an army of soldiers with lethal blood?”

The way she said it, like we could be used as a weapon, made my skin crawl.

“And what do they get out of it, this trade? The aliens?”

Simon jumped in. “We’ve asked ourselves the same thing a million different ways. Thing is, we’re not even sure who they are exactly. Maybe our DNA has something they need. Or maybe, the way we use lab animals, we’re just guinea pigs to them. Maybe they’re doing all this weird shit to us, and then releasing us back into the wild.”

“And me?” I asked. “What does that make me? If I’m not . . . still me?” I looked at my hands again, my fingers, the lines running across my palms, because they looked so . . . so ordinary. Same as they always had.

Griffin sighed. “My dad liked to talk. He was one of those guys who liked the sound of his own voice, and when I was”—she exhaled again—“when I was one of his subjects, a captive audience, he told me one of the things both sides wanted all along was to create a replicate—an exact human copy. Not a hybrid, but more like an alien clone that looked entirely human. It was what they referred to as a Replacement. Made from the genetic material of the aliens but still containing all the memories and life experiences of the human they were replicating.

“My dad called it the ultimate scientific achievement. He said it would decide what truly defines life: heredity or history.”

I recoiled from her words. Her explanation. Especially since I was “the human” in question. “Life?” I had to ask. “What does that even mean? My heart is beating, my blood—even though it’s not the same human blood it was before—is still pumping. I’m breathing. Aren’t those the things that make me alive?”

“Are they?” Simon cut in. “Is it your genetics that make you the person you are? Or is it about who you are? The other things—the stuff your parents taught you about being a good person or that you throw a killer rise ball and win championships—all the things that have nothing to do with DNA or blood . . .” He reached out and tugged at my new fake brunette hair. “. . . or hair color?”