Chapter 3 - The Seventeenth Daniel
We escaped through the crawlspace seconds before the scanning device activated.
Daniel carried Lily while I held the rabbit and the encrypted drive. We reached a storm drain behind the neighborhood just as blue beams swept across our house.
Inside the tunnel, Daniel’s convulsions stopped.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
“The drive triggered a memory partition.”
“A what?”
“A sealed section of Daniel’s mind.”
He now remembered Project Janus more clearly.
D-17 was not the first vessel created in my husband’s image. Sixteen earlier bodies had failed. Some rejected the memories and became catatonic. Others woke believing they were Daniel but collapsed when conflicting identities emerged.
One escaped.
Aegis destroyed him after he attempted to contact me.
“You remember that?” I asked.
“I remember watching it through Daniel’s eyes.”
The original Daniel had witnessed the execution of D-9. That was when he understood Aegis did not intend to preserve human life. They wanted obedient replacements who could assume the identities of politicians, scientists and corporate leaders.
Janus vessels were not immortal copies.
They were infiltration weapons.
Daniel began sabotaging the project from within. He encoded a portion of his memory into D-17 and arranged the laboratory blackout that allowed the vessel to escape.
“Why didn’t he leave?” I asked.
“Because Director Voss had already taken Lily’s genetic profile.”
Lily stopped walking.
“Why do they want me?”
Daniel knelt before her.
“I don’t know yet.”
The drive required a biological key. When Lily touched it, a small light turned green. A map appeared on my phone, pointing to an abandoned pediatric clinic outside Baltimore.
We reached the clinic near dawn.
A woman named Dr. Evelyn Shaw waited inside. She was in her sixties, with silver hair and a scar running along one side of her jaw.
She looked at Daniel and began to cry.
“You survived.”
“Did you build me?” he asked.
“I helped design your neural lattice.”
“Then tell me what I am.”
Evelyn hesitated.
“You are a consciousness created from Daniel Collins’s memories, but your decisions are your own. That makes you more than a machine and less than the man you remember being.”
“Where is he?”
“Sublevel Four.”
Alive.
The word struck me so hard that I had to sit down.
Aegis kept Daniel suspended in a medically induced coma. They repeatedly extracted memories to improve D-17’s stability. Each procedure damaged him.
“How long can he survive?” I asked.
“Days, perhaps.”
Evelyn examined the encrypted drive. It contained evidence of every Janus subject and the identities of people targeted for replacement. But the files would open only through Lily.
Daniel and I both assumed the key involved her DNA.
Evelyn shook her head.
“It requires a memory.”
She placed sensors around Lily’s temples. The drive projected a recording of Daniel holding his newborn daughter. He whispered a sequence of words that sounded like a lullaby.
Lily recognized it.
“That’s our nightmare song.”
She sang the final line.
The drive opened.
Names filled the screen.
Judges. Military officers. Journalists. Researchers.
Some were marked “observed.” Others were marked “replaced.”
My husband’s name appeared beside D-17.
My name appeared lower on the list.
MARA COLLINS — STATUS: CONTINUITY CONFIRMED.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
Evelyn turned pale.
She took a blood sample and compared it with a medical record from eleven years earlier.
The results did not match.
“The hospital record says this blood belongs to Mara Collins,” she said. “But your current DNA is different.”
“That’s impossible.”
Unless the record was false.
Or I was.
Before Evelyn could explain, the clinic lost power.
Red emergency lights illuminated the corridor.
Daniel turned toward the entrance.
“Aegis found us.”
Vehicles surrounded the building. Armed agents entered from both sides.
Evelyn led us toward the basement, where an old ambulance tunnel opened behind the clinic. As we descended, she gave me a sealed envelope.
“Daniel asked me to keep this until you discovered the discrepancy.”
Inside was a photograph of me lying unconscious inside an Aegis laboratory.
The date was eleven years earlier, three months before Lily was born.
Beneath the photograph, my husband had written:
“Mara died for seven minutes. What came back may not have been entirely her.”
I wanted to reject it, but a memory surfaced.
A hospital room. Daniel crying. A doctor saying there had been complications.
Then something else.
A bright blue light.
A voice asking me to repeat my name.
The memory vanished.
Daniel grabbed my hand and pulled me into the tunnel as gunfire struck the walls.
Behind us, Evelyn remained at the control panel.
“Go!” she shouted.
“What about you?”
“Someone has to erase the path.”
The blast doors closed between us.
Seconds later, an explosion shook the clinic.
Evelyn’s signal disappeared.
We emerged in the woods with no vehicle, no money and no way to know whether she had survived.
Daniel looked at the photograph in my hand.
“Mara, whatever Aegis did to you, they may have started Janus long before they built me.”
Lily squeezed my fingers.
“You’re still my mom.”
May you like
I wanted to believe her.
Then I noticed a thin line of blue light moving beneath the skin of my wrist.
