Regenesis

“We’ll talk about this tomorrow. In the office.”

“Damn it, Dad, you can’t come in there. It’s a security clearance area and you haven’t got one. So keep out!”

Jordan reached into his pocket and held out a card. Justin started to take it, automatically, and when he stalled in sudden apprehension that it had nothing to do with the office or the security clearance issue, Jordan reached out and dropped it into his coat pocket.

He wasn’t a kid, to skip out of the way. It was ludicrous. It was also an attack.

“Damn it, Jordan.”

“Damn what?”

He’d had earnest hopes when he’d heard Jordan was released and when Jordan made it home to a changed Reseune, that he’d have the father he’d been deprived of during all the Nye years. Everything would be healed and clean and new.

Neither Paul nor Grant said a word to what had just happened. He wanted to take the card out of his pocket, fling it away to be trampled by passers‑by, swept up by the cleaning‑bots–pounced on by security. He didn’t even reach into his pocket to look at it. “I really don’t appreciate this. Dad.”

“Tomorrow,” Jordan said. “See you tomorrow. That’s still one of your non‑teaching days, isn’t it?”

“No,” he said. “You’re notmoving in with us.”

“Tomorrow,” Jordan said again–the way he’d just held his ground in arguments two decades ago. No argument. Just a position from which he wouldn’t budge. “That was myoffice.”

“Damn it, Jordan.”

“My office, I say. Sure you won’t come over for an after‑di

“Good night,” Justin said, and started off in his own direction, toward the doors. Grant walked beside him, not saying a word until they’d exited the corridor for the outside, and started across the darkened quadrangle.

“You told him no,” Grant said. “But he will come ahead tomorrow anyway, won’t he?”

“My bet is on it,” he said. “And we’ve got to advise the staff Lock up the office if we have to. Damn him, Grant, damnhim. All he has to do to fit in is just do nothing. That’s the only requirement, just settle in, don’t push any buttons, and let things be.” Grant said nothing in reply, and Justin remembered that face, set and angry: Jordan, his elder twin–biologically speaking. Twin psychologically speaking, so far as being raised by his father went. Next best thing to psychogenesis.

Ari’s face, too. Elder Ari’s face. A glass in his hand. The feeling of being drugged. Sex. And a voice saying–

He couldn’t remember what she’d said. To this day, it blacked out at that point. He’d tried not to let his father know what had happened. He’d tried so hard.

But too many had known.

And he’d spent his next years being arrested for the suspicion of thinking. He’d given up his father’s head‑on attack on life and adopted a stubbor

Mirror into mirror, physically, himself with Jordan. But the psychology Jordan knew in his son had been Worked on and Worked over every time they’d arrested him and hauled him in…

He suspected they’d tried to bend him, at least.

But cracking any Working the first Ari had done–that wasn’t easy. He’d been set on a course. He’d even begun to cling to it, mentally, telling himself from the start that the Nyes could have done the murder themselves, and that they might someday kill him, but they weren’t going to crack him, because he was Ari’spiece of work. What kept him alive, he greatly suspected, was the fact they couldn’t tell whether he was somehow essential in the plans Ari had laid down–essential in the construction of her own psychological and physiological clone. The genius that had made Reseune what it was had to be reborn to keep the power Reseune had, which was currently in their hands: and if Justin Warrick was somehow part of it–the Nyes had to keep him alive.

They’d gone into convulsions of policy when their precious clone had found her way to him.

They hadn’t known what to do with him after that, except try to make sure he didn’t come up with any Working of his own, where it regarded the little girl, who’d become a bigger girl, who’d become a young woman and developed notions her guardians finally couldn’t control.

Sex, prominent among them. He’d gotten away from her. He’d known that was worth his life, but the Nyes weren’t what scared hell out of him in that regard. What scared him was young Ari herself, the fact that there was no predicting what psychological trigger could go off in that interface, as if whatever the first Ari had done had set a mark on him that wouldn’t stay quiet if he ever got involved with child‑Ari. It wasn’t where he wanted to go. It wasn’t who he was supposed to be. His whole being shrieked no and he backed away.

And Jordan came back into his life, now that the Nyes were done, and now that Ya

Ya

They were all watched, constantly, had been for years, and Ya

And a third Ariane, someday. That event was already in the pla

And come the day, the inevitable day–the question would be…which of the two Aris ought to be born again.

And how many of the people who’d been part and parcel of the second Ari’s life had to be recreated, and whichAri were those replicates going to have to deal with?

He had a horrid suspicion a storage somewhere now had hisdata, and Grant’s programming, and maybe Ya

He didn’t know how much of that situation Jordan knew. How did you tell your father you–and therefore he, through you–were destined for immortality, right along with the original Ari, Jordan’s onetime partner and lifelong rival, all to help her exist again and go on shaping humankind for all eternity?

It wasn’t going to make for family tranquility once Jordan got that picture, that was for very damned certain.

And that city young Ari was founding, upriver from ReseuneLabs? Who wasgoing to live there, but people that Ari didn’t want living under Reseune’s roof, or downriver in Novgorod, either, where the government and other troubles resided?

“It should have been a pleasant evening,” he remarked, in the chill, deep silence of the deserted quadrangle, the absence, usually, of electronic bugs…unless somebody was aiming ears specifically at them. And he wouldn’t say absolutely that that wasn’t the case, given the red flag of Jordan’s invitation. “I’d tried to look forward to it.” He felt the card in his pocket, a little paper card.