Chapter 6 - The Daniel Who Came First
Federal doctors confirmed that the body rescued from Hawthorne belonged to Daniel Collins.
His fingerprints, dental records and DNA matched.
That did not prove his memories were original.
Aegis had extracted, edited and reinserted his mind repeatedly. Some memories may have come from earlier vessels. Others may have been constructed.
Daniel remembered our wedding but not the weather. He remembered Lily’s birth but placed it in the wrong hospital. He remembered building the crawlspace, yet Adam knew where every screw was located.
Neither man could establish priority through memory alone.
Lily solved the practical problem.
She called the original body “Dad” and the synthetic one “Adam.”
Adam accepted it.
Daniel struggled.
“You have my childhood,” he told Adam during rehabilitation.
“I remember it,” Adam replied. “That does not mean I lived it.”
“You remember loving my wife.”
Adam looked toward me.
“Yes.”
The honesty hurt everyone.
Aegis collapsed publicly. Governments opened investigations, investors disappeared and laboratories were seized.
Yet Site Zero remained missing.
The coordinates from the hidden message pointed to an area beneath the Arctic Ocean where no facility should exist. Satellite images showed only ice.
Evelyn believed the coordinates were encoded.
The key might be hidden inside my neural scaffold.
To access it, she needed to examine memories from the period after my accident.
The process was dangerous. Aegis had placed defensive barriers inside the implant. Forcing entry could erase parts of my identity.
I agreed.
During the scan, I relived the hospital.
I saw Daniel standing beside my bed, younger and terrified. Voss told him my brain damage was irreversible.
Then I saw something I had never remembered.
Another woman lay in a second bed.
She had my face.
The first synthetic Mara existed before I woke.
Voss asked Daniel to choose.
My biological body could receive an experimental neural scaffold with a low chance of survival. The synthetic body could receive a complete memory transfer and almost certainly live.
Daniel chose both.
He ordered the team to activate the copy while operating on me.
For seven minutes, two versions of Mara Collins were conscious in the same room.
The synthetic Mara opened her eyes first.
She spoke to Daniel, remembered our marriage and begged him not to let the doctors shut her down.
Then my biological body woke.
Daniel chose me.
Voss moved the synthetic Mara to Site Zero instead of destroying her.
The older woman in the hidden message was not another random copy.
She was the first Mara who remembered being abandoned by my husband.
When I woke from the scan, Daniel was crying.
“You knew,” I said.
“I thought Voss terminated her.”
“She asked you to save her.”
“I had to choose.”
“No. You allowed them to treat one of us as property.”
Adam stood at the back of the room. His expression told me he understood the abandoned Mara better than Daniel ever could.
Evelyn extracted a sequence from the memory:
71 NORTH — JANUS BELOW THE FIRST LIGHT.
She combined it with a date from Daniel’s original research. The coordinates pointed to an island owned by a shell company near Greenland.
Site Zero.
Federal authorities refused to launch an immediate raid. They wanted weeks to verify jurisdiction.
We did not have weeks.
The hidden message contained a timer. It would reach zero in nine days.
No one knew what would happen then.
Adam volunteered to go.
“So do I,” Daniel said.
“You can barely walk,” I replied.
“It began with me.”
“It began before any of us understood it.”
Lily listened from the hallway.
“You’re all going to leave me again.”
I knelt before her.
“I want you somewhere safe.”
“There is nowhere safe if they can copy everyone.”
She was right, but she was still a child.
Evelyn offered to stay with her at a protected facility. Lily agreed only after I promised to return.
Before we departed, she gave Adam the old rabbit.
“You need a memory that belongs only to you.”
Adam placed it inside his coat.
We traveled to Greenland using an aircraft provided by Samuel’s contacts. Evelyn remained connected remotely.
As the island appeared beneath us, the timer dropped below six days.
Thermal images showed an enormous structure under the ice.
We landed during a storm.
The entrance opened before we reached it.
No guards appeared.
Inside, the walls were warm and illuminated by blue lines. Rows of chambers stretched into darkness.
Each contained a sleeping person.
Daniel stopped at the first row.
Inside were versions of him at different ages.
Some were synthetic.
Others appeared biological.
At the center of the chamber stood the older Mara from the message.
She looked at me without surprise.
“You arrived with two of them,” she said. “That is more generous than the last Mara.”
“The last Mara?”
She smiled.
“You still believe you are the first biological version.”
A door opened behind her.
Another woman entered.
She also had my face.
Then another.
And another.
Thirty-one Maras stood inside Site Zero.
The timer was not counting down to an attack.
It was counting down to an election.
May you like
One version of each copied person would be selected to leave.
The rest would be erased.
