old military equipment brought down here. Over the years, he had tinkered with the idea of continuing the military research and even experimenting with a neural transfer, but he was called away on the expedition to Colony 13. I was fortunate that he left detailed enough notes so that after he was gone, I was able to perform the procedure he had set up. And voilà—here you sit!”
Reznik was trying to process all the information. The part about the underground research facility and cryogenics seemed to ring a bell, but the details were foggy.
“So how did I get from my old body into this one? Where did it come from? And what happened to my old body?”
“I’m sorry. Your old body was damaged beyond repair. The military had you cryogenically frozen. I don’t know if the intent was to repair your old body when medical tech had caught up or not, but they suddenly started making some huge breakthroughs in cloning technology. It was all Special Access stuff—super secret, since cloning was officially banned by the United Nations.”
There was a long silence as Reznik combed through the fragments of the past that he could remember. His memory was getting much better, but he still could not recall anything more than bits and pieces of the details of his participation in the DARPA project. She was watching him intently, and he shook his head in frustration. “It isn’t coming back to me yet… It’s still a jumbled blur. I remember getting put into one of those cryo-vats and then seeing a face through the window, but that’s about it.”
“Give it some more time,” she said. “Most of your memory has been filling in, right?” At his nod she reached over and squeezed his hand. Their eyes met and she smiled that sad smile of hers again. “I saw you, you know—the real you. I was just a little girl at the time.”
Reznik’s eyes went wide. “You saw me in the cryochamber?”
She nodded. “I wasn’t supposed to. Father had taken me to the office one day and he got called out to a meeting or something, so I was left behind with Nancy—his secretary—to watch me. She went down to the basement to get supplies and I snuck down after her. Not knowing that I had followed her down there, she went back up while I poked around like the curious little girl I was. I remember seeing a mouse run under a large tarp in the back of the room. I went to follow it and pulled up the tarp. When I did, it slid down and I saw a large metal and glass tube with a frozen man inside it. I screamed and ran. Nancy tried to calm me down, and when Father returned, I thought he would yell at me, but he didn’t. He explained that the man had gone to sleep because he was hurt badly and he was waiting for a smart doctor to come along who could make him as good as new when he came back out.”
“Well, I definitely feel as good as new, that’s for sure.” Realizing she still held his hand—not that he was complaining—he squeezed hers. “Where did this body come from?”
“That, I’m not too sure about. My father doesn’t share all of his secrets. I would assume he either recovered it from the same site where he found you, or he got it through his connections in the medical field. Black market, maybe. All I know is that high-quality genetically engineered clones are VERY expensive, and your body had all the military tech already built in.”
“Why did they abandon us in that lab? I think I remember others that were frozen, as well—what happened to them?”
“I’m not sure about that part—you’d have to ask my father about the rest. It’s likely that the military ran out of funding and the program was shut down sometime prior to the bankrupting of the central government. From the state that he found the facility in, I think it’s pretty clear that they had shuttered it with the hope and expectation that they were going to get funding restored in the near future. As for the rest of your question, Father told me that the life support backup power systems had failed on the other cryochambers, and yours was close to failing when he found you. When they announced the impending impact event and Father made arrangements for us to join the Colony, he knew