The elevators doors opened to Doctor Gordon’s laboratory. The place was, in simple terms, a mess. There were papers everywhere, empty glasses and plates piled up from numerous meals he’d had down here since his capture. There was a single long table in the center of the room with a half-dozen computers sitting on top of it, all of them linked together and running simulations simultaneously.

The walls were made of concrete, but I saw two doorways leading down to long hallways at the other end of the room, glass doors showing a dozen different laboratory spaces. On one of the walls was a flat-screen television set that reminded me of the ones in the home office. There were security cameras on all four corners of the room and I saw similar ones filling the hallway, meaning that this entire place was being monitored—or would be monitored if the security guards upstairs weren’t all dead.

What I didn’t see was Doctor Gordon. Seeing no sign of movement or panicked residents, I couldn’t help but wonder if no one was here. I was disabused by that notion when two young Hispanic men exited one of the hallways carrying A4-machine guns, talking about a woman named Lola. It was a bizarre conversation to be had given the events upstairs, and I guessed they weren’t aware of the massacre that had taken place.

I lifted Marissa’s pistol and shot them both in the head, only one of them seeing me before the second shot was put in his skull. The noise made by the gun was almost imperceptible, sounding like little more than a pfft, closer to a movie silencer than the kind of suppressor usually used by soldiers.

Their bodies hit the ground almost simultaneously.

“That wasn’t necessary, F,” Doctor Gordon’s voice came from the other hallway entrance. “They were just boys.”

Doctor Gordon was wearing a tweed sweater and khaki pants with a painter’s smock over his body, not exactly the sort of thing you wanted to wear while performing sensitive scientific experiments. Then again, I had no idea what he was doing down here and it was possible the Carnevale’s members only had the vaguest idea themselves. I expected some sort of flash of recognition looking into his face, some sort of memory of him either as my father or as the man who trained me.

Instead, there was nothing. He was just another man. A face among thousands.

“I’m not F,” I said, putting down my gun. “I’m G.”

Gordon blinked rapidly, looking suddenly unnerved. “Ah, I see. Is F dead?”

“Yes.”

“Did you do it?”

“Does it matter?”

Gordon looked away. “I suppose not. Are you here to kill me?”

I raised my gun at his forehead. “I’ve been given orders to extract you or put a bullet in you.” Before Gordon could respond, I put the gun down. “But I’ve chosen a third option. I’m going to let you go if you give me back my memories.”

“What?” Gordon blinked.

It came out of me, a flood of emotions like I’d never expected. Hope, anger, resentment, joy, and remorse. “I’m sick of being someone’s puppet. There’s a woman up there, a woman I love. She sent me down here to become something more than that. I need answers. Who I was, who I am, and where I come from. I want to be more than a tool.”

Gordon’s next words were heartbreaking. “I’m sorry, G, but that’s not possible.”

I knocked over one of the computers with my hand, sending it flying through the air and smashing against one of the walls. It was strange that now, of all times, was when my emotions were finally reaching their peak. This mission had been a nightmare and I was well and truly sick of being jerked around. “Why the fuck not?!”

The conditioning was gone now, or maybe my emotions were so intense it didn’t matter. I was as close to a normal human being as I’d ever been in my life. Scared, angry, exhausted, sick, guilty, hopeful, and a thousand other emotions all at once.

Gordon’s face went through a variety of indescribable emotions but finally settled on pity. “I’ll show you.”

The scientist looked away from the dead bodies on the ground and walked over to one of the computers before typing on it for a few minutes. The flat screen television set proceeded to pop up an image of something I never expected to see.

Fetuses.

In amber fluid-filled tubes.

The footage was time-stamped twelve years ago.

A younger Doctor Gordon walked out, wearing a proper lab coat. “The first viable batch of Project: Cash Crop is ready. We’ve alphabetized them for ease of understanding. I want to reassure our sponsors that these clones are lacking anything but the most rudimentary brain development. In other words, they’re empty vessels for our project rather than humans we’re misusing.” The Doctor Gordon on screen patted a tube marked G. It contained a fetus that looked about nine months old. “Even if they’re adorable.”

The film clip switched to a later scene, showing the tubes’ contents growing older and progressively more adult before my eyes. When they were adults, they were released and brain-shaped machines were surgically put into their skulls. I watched them start to learn things astonishingly fast, from language to fighting. I watched the samples of the nightmarish perversion of childhood Gordon displayed for almost ten minutes.

Too stunned and horrified to look away or react.

It ended when all of this was wiped from the future Letters’ minds.

Doctor Gordon sighed. “Those are your memories, G. I’m sorry. You don’t have a past to return to.”

“I’m a fucking clone?” I said, feeling like I needed to vomit up everything in my stomach.

This wasn’t possible.

This wasn’t happening.

No!

“Everything but your brain is cloned tissue, yes.” Gordon looked at me, then looked to the flat screen. “One of twenty-six models chosen from the best agents of the CIA, Special Forces, FBI, NSA, and Marines. Fourteen men, twelve women. Not perfect clones, though, but altered as to have roughly similar abilities. One of them, your template, is my son with Doctor Rebecca Stonewood.”

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

I fell to my knees, dropping my gun on the ground. An emotion unlike any other I’d felt in my entire life happened as I stared up at him. It was a cold, bleak emptiness without a shred of hope for the future or belief in my own value. A moment ago, I was a person looking forward to “I… my memories?”

“You were educated via a collection of footage and data-tapes designed to give you all the information a person of your age and build should possess. Rebecca did her best to provide you, perhaps more than she should have.”

“So, the girl and the woman from my dreams…”

“Just family video tapes among other information Rebecca imparted upon you. They accepted Daniel’s death. She didn’t.”

I remembered that moment, but how could I? It was something that had happened to someone else. “So, Reassignment—”

“It’s all a lie, G. You are put through your training after you’re decanted from the tube, then wiped of your memories. When you serve your ten years, they’ll give you a set of false memories with a conditioned family to look after you as your body fails.”

I bolted to my feet and ran at him, grabbing him and slamming him up against the wall. The flat screen behind him smashed against his back. “Fails?! What do you mean, fails?!”

Gordon’s head slammed against the concrete behind him and he looked woozy. I slapped him across the face, an action I immediately regretted.

Gordon just blinked, bleeding from the cut on his mouth I’d created. “Yes, fails. Your bodies are modified to accept Black Technological enhancements. We managed to fix the problem of telomere decay most clones suffer, but the human body isn’t meant to handle the kind of hardware we put inside you. Reassignment allows you to—be monitored for future effects.”

“How long?” I shouted in his face. “HOW LONG?!”

I wished this was all a dream. But everything was sharp, perfect, and clear.

I had my answers.

This was my reality.

“After your ten years of service, two to five years. It depends on the amount of enhancement you’ve received. We’re monitoring the issue, were monitoring the issue to determine how much—”

I interrupted him by throwing him to the ground and picking up a pistol hidden in one of the dead man’s pockets before aiming at the back of his head. “You fucking bastard.”

“Yes,” Gordon said, raising his hands up above his head. “That would be accurate. You were a product for me, a chance to make a fortune from the US military with expendable perfect soldiers without families or friends. The initial experiments were considered monstrous but some people were interested, some people who thought with a little tweaking, the project could be made palatable.”

“Palatable.” I practically spit the word. “How?”

“Your brain isn’t organic,” Gordon said, sighing. “Your IRD implant isn’t an implant. It’s the whole of your consciousness. It’s a microchip in a processing unit occupying the space where your brain should be located. You’re not a human being in the eyes of the law, G, you’re a machine.”

I took deep breath. “I’ve always been a machine.”

I pulled on the trigger of my pistol.

Gordon proceeded to wet himself as the bullet sailed past him. I could smell his terror and now that I knew I wasn’t a human being, I opened myself to the full range of senses my IRD implant provided. I realized I could monitor his heart rate, his body temperature, and a dozen other things that I shouldn’t be able to, but could.

I was breathing heavily now, even though my body regulated its oxygen intake regardless of my emotional state.

“I still have questions,” I said, wanting to kill him.

He wasn’t my father.

He was my fucking creator.

Gordon took a deep breath. “We harvest the IRD’s memory cards after the death of agents. The ones that aren’t destroyed, at least. The experiences they’ve accumulated can be taken from their memory drive and uploaded into new bodies. You’re the second G with all the skills of the original inside him. The death of her child for a second time is why Rebecca fled. Left us. Left the project.”

I became eerily calm. Too much emotion caused me to shut down. There were tears in my contact-covered eyes and my nose was running, but I wasn’t feeling anything.

“I don’t care about that,” I lied. “I want to know who Persephone answers to. I want to know what this is all about.” If I was going to die in less than a decade, I wanted to find everyone responsible for this atrocity and kill them. Screw Marissa’s plan to subvert them to the United States’ service. I wanted revenge.

“That’s not going to give you the answers you seek,” Gordon said, sounding almost sympathetic. He was still terrified, but there were other emotions: guilt and shame.

Good.

“Fuck off with your advice, Frankenstein,” I whispered. “Just answer the question.”

Gordon swallowed and nodded. “The Society answers to the Karma Corp board of directors, Universiti PMC, and Halifax International.”

“That’s it? It works for a trio of corporations. This is all for money?”

“They’re the ones my team sold the plans to and receive the paycheck from the government for supervising. Yes. They’re doing a lot of illegal shit, mind you, but they have plenty of documents that say C’est par mon ordre et pour le bien de l’Etat que le porteur du present a fait ce qu’il a fait.”

Which was French for It is by my order and for the good of the state that the bearer of this has done what he has done.

“Mind you, I don’t know how much they’re worth, but it’s all supposedly for the greater good. That’s what they tell themselves while raking in their fat paychecks, at least. Kill the Saudi Prince’s mistress and a human rights lawyer for national security,” Gordon said, shaking his head. “You didn’t think this was part of a big grand conspiracy, did you? Sorry. No. Even Black Technology is just DARPA classified material with a hefty order of proprietary copyright. There are no Illuminati here, only corporate greed and malfeasance.”

“Why are you here?” I asked my final questions. “Were you kidnapped or are you here voluntarily?”

Gordon didn’t answer.

I smacked him to the ground with the butt of my gun, just barely keeping myself from shooting him then and there. “Answer the question! Please!” I was desperate now. At my most human, my most confused, broken, and alone. This was not what I wanted. I wanted to go back to the blissful horrid ignorance I’d possessed before coming down here.

Gordon felt the back of his head. “After Rebecca left, I started looking at you robo—cyborgs differently. I noticed how very human you could be and the conditioning process used to make your handlers was designed to give you emotional satisfaction. In short, I started to see how human you really were. That’s why I started leaking information to the Carnevale. I wanted to get loose by promising them my people, and I recruited F to help. He was always my favorite. The most human of you. I knew I was getting in bed with psychopaths, but I wanted to let out the information I’d managed to accumulate on the Society, Karma Corp, Universiti, Task Force-22 and the US government. I was going to turn whistle-blower.”

Anger replaced my regret. This sonofabitch’s selfishness had no limits.

“You realize they’d just kill us, right? Wipe the place and records clean. They’d never find any of our bodies.”

He looked back at me. “Is what you have really a life?”

I shot him in the throat. He fell backwards, trying to hold his neck closed but failing as blood spurted out everywhere.

I let him choke to death in his own blood.

Then I shot his corpse six more times.

Seven for the seventh letter of the alphabet.

That was when I heard a gun click behind me and I turned around to look at the figure of Marissa. She took a look down at Doctor Gordon’s body, then up at me. She could have told me I shouldn’t have done that, but didn’t. In a weird way, we’d come to an understanding, and I no longer blamed her for the events we’d had to go through together.

“Did you know?” I asked.

“Which part?”

I explained what Doctor Gordon had said.

Marissa’s eyes widened. “I—”

“Does it change anything?” I asked, daring her to tell me it didn’t. She had been lovers with a machine this entire time.

Marissa lowered her gaze. “No, no it doesn’t.”

I believed her. “All right then.”

“I’ve contacted the President. She wants to speak with you personally at a secure facility. The International Refugee Society’s base in Boston was cleaned out, but we’ve captured a number of the facility members. I believe they want you to be a tool to spearhead the capture of the other Letters. They’ll offer you a pardon and United States citizenship if you agree.”

“Do I get to kill the people responsible for this? Because I will.”

Marissa paused. “They will want them alive—so we’ll have to figure out a way to do it that doesn’t piss them off.”

I nodded. “Let’s go.”

The End

AGENT G'S STORY WILL CONTINUE IN AGENT G: SABOTEUR