Adam took a seat.
How come his house had become the setting for one of those old Noir movies? Of course, no one was questioning him—not for now, at least—but the rest of the elements were there: the lamp above his head, the table, the thugs surrounding him; everything.
Out of the corner of his eye, he tried to see what Malin was doing, but a sharp sound startled him: Juzo had just thrown some files on the table, three or four folders crammed with documents.
“Aw! Do you remember printed things?” Adam said. “A blast from the past.”
He wanted to check the files, but his brother put a hand on them. And so, thousands of assumptions surfaced in his mind about the content of those documents, from a military investigation related to Homam Enterprises and the freighter held by the Markabian Empire—where in that case his brother would indeed be part of the fascist regime—to something related with his time as an underwear model. Lisandro, his former boss, belonged to a wealthy family with a lot of political influence; it wouldn’t be a surprise if there had been shady financial dealings under the table. After all, this was Proxima where the most insane transaction could have been possible. Whatever the case may be, only old government institutions or the military continued to use paper so compulsively.
“I never knew I had a brother out there,” Juzo confessed, “until I had access to this.” He tapped the files. “Records of a scientific project that you and I have been a part of since our inception; the Binary Atavistic Project. We were separated months after we were born as part of the experiment.”
Adam raised his eyebrows. The situation was escalating and becoming more and more surreal. Now, he didn’t know whether to laugh or worry more than he already was.
“Experiment about what?” he asked. “Check if telepathy between twins is really a thing or something like that? If that was the case, then the project has failed.”
Juzo waited a few seconds, as if debating whether or not to say it.
“Get superhuman abilities,” he replied.
Adam sighed, annoyed. Did they take him for an idiot?
“Oh, yeah. If it wasn’t telepathy, it was option B, the superpowers thing,” he said, pointing to Juzo’s uniform. “Lemme guess: Create a kind of super soldier, right? Wow, those scientists from way back when—they did like to waste resources on those things, didn’t they?”
“It was more than that.” Juzo opened one of the files.
Adam fixed his eyes on them, and considering the brightness, the sharpness of the color and the neatness of the paper, he assumed that they were recent copies of documents several years old; there were crease marks along the edges of the files that weren’t real, but a print.
Juzo took out a couple of sheets from the folder and put them on the table. They were new copies of old photographs, surely physical, since the discoloration of the original images was noticeable due to the friction between papers plus the passage of time.
The oddness returned to Adam. He took them and held them under the light to see them better.
In the first one, he appeared as a child, smiling; his hair shone like a copper helmet on his head. He looked happy in front of a cake with a large candle lit, surrounded by children who were as happy as he was. That day had been his tenth birthday. The next photo showed him as a teenager. The first facial features that now characterized him were beginning to show, especially his smile. He was dressed in his orphanage’s soccer team T-shirt, posing next to his team. That had been the last Intercollegiate Orphanage Championship of the Proxima district he had played, twelve or thirteen years ago.
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“And you pretend to exemplify the project with these?” Adam tossed the copies on the table. “The only thing they prove is that there’s someone with a lot of free time to hack into my orphanage’s photo bank.”
And suddenly, an idea struck him. Of course! Everything was very clear now.
“You need a transplant, right? You intend to use me as a donor, you bastard!” He grabbed the sheaf of files and shook them. “These are your medical tests, aren’t they?” He pointed to the photos. “That’s why you’ve been researching me, to make sure my organs are a match!”
Malin snorted, arms folded, and spun around in a circle like someone trying to hold back from bursting. From her body language, it was obvious, at least to Adam, that she was just as uncomfortable with the situation as he was.
Juzo took a deep breath and opened another of the folders. This one was packed with pages and pages of reports, most of them covered with long black stripes.
“Sorry, I don’t know how to read the censorship language,” Adam said, although Juzo hadn’t intended to show him the reports but copies of other photographs that were attached to them.
The photos showed different shots of two babies, each sleeping in a glassy, incubator-like container, with thousands of tiny needles attached to their little bodies, in what appeared to be a dreadful acupuncture session.
With deep contempt for such an atrocity, Adam took one of the photos, shook it in disgust, and tossed it among the others. “What about these?” he said. “Apart from being morbid, what is their contribution to this?”
“Those babies are us.”
Juzo’s answer wasn’t the greatest revelation ever; in fact, Adam expected something like that. The earliest photo of him that there were records of was the one that was taken as part of the procedure when he was found abandoned in the hospital, and according to the report of the attending physician, he was approximately one-year-old at the time. And yes, he couldn’t deny that there were many similarities between him and any of the two babies that appeared in these photos. On the other hand, many babies looked alike. And to add fuel to the fire of distrust, there were several factors that played against his good judgment, such as the lack of sharpness of the original photographs and, of course, the obvious possibility that they were doctored images.
“Let’s just say I believe these two are us,” Adam said; he was truly debating whether to believe it or not. “What kind of sick bastard does this with a couple of babies?”
“With several babies,” Malin remarked scornfully. “You two weren’t the only ones.”
Adam crossed his arms. “So, what? These people trafficked babies, turned them into lab rats, and then tossed them in the first orphanage they found, hoping one of them would grow up to develop super strength or something like that?”
Juzo bowed. “Something like that.”
Adam shrugged. “Well, you and I, together or apart, that’s beside the point,” he said. “In the hypothetical case that this project has existed... we can agree that it was a failure. Because the only superpower I have is my smile and some money, and you are bad in at least one of those aspects. Don’t take this the wrong way, dude, but I gotta tell you; I’m as far from being a super soldier as you are from being a librarian. So, what do you intend to do with these documents? You want me to help you take the people behind the project to court or something? Because I know good lawyers, but…”
“I don’t know who the scientists involved were,” Juzo replied. “For all I know, they might even be dead. The project has been stalled for years.”
Adam was even more puzzled than before. “So? What’s the deal?”
Juzo did not reply. Malin neither.
Adam took one last glance at the copies of the photographs. “Look, I’m glad to know I have a brother,” he said. “But if you were just trying to get my attention—I dunno, dude. A few beers would have been more effective than trying to scare me with secret projects that aren’t even relevant anymore.” He tossed the pictures and shook his head. “If you want, we can talk about it another day, okay? Now you’d better get out of my house. I’m serious.”
Juzo leaned closer to Adam and raised his fist. Wait! Was that pushy creep going to punch him? Adam braced himself for the brawl. But Juzo opened his hand as if he was about to show him something that he had hidden.
“Now what? A magic trick?”
Juzo made a claw-like hand, contracted his fingers twice, and in his palm, there was a spark of electricity. Threads of blue light danced between his fingers until they became a mass of crackling blue flames.