friends and colleague interviews – they were in the early stages of reconstructing Carlos. The inspector’s imagination had been so affected by the environment that he saw the whole project biologically: they were attempting now to regrow Carlos. Not Carlos himself, but a replica: a clone of the missing person. The more comprehensive the replica became, the more susceptible it would be to interrogation. Discovering Carlos, discovering at least what had happened to Carlos, may come down to their ability or otherwise to establish a reasonably complex and faithful simulacrum.
The thing with clones, especially in popular entertainment, was that they missed out the maturation process and went straight to a fully formed identity. Really you had to start earlier, the new identity had to be born, then age in the world. Strictly, then, in cloning Carlos they might have to wait twenty-nine years to find out what had happened… He was both frightened by and attracted to the idea that a clone maintained absolute fidelity to the original life. They could watch the individual from birth, a team of them, from a distance, conducting the experiment under approximately natural conditions, only the clone unaware of his origin. They would monitor him growing, record reams of apparently innocuous data hoping that a code might be expressed, clues preceding his ultimate disappearance from the family gathering that night at La Cueva.
But that was fantasy. Science fiction. His idea, a legitimate, practical idea, was to rebuild Carlos’s office. He would find a suitable space and begin reconstructing it; the walls, the floor, the desk. He would render the simulacrum as faithfully as possible. In duplicating the office he hoped something might emerge. Nothing fantastical – he didn’t expect the man to re-materialize out of posthumously coated walls. It boiled down to traditional and routine police work: he was trying to develop an insight into the identity through a closer understanding of the environment. He would go into the office every morning and leave in the evening at matching times. Something might come through. Whether, in regrowing the original office, the same illness might bloom – the illness that seemed to have dismantled Carlos – was a thought he quietly ignored.
He found a garage to let in the dry-field industrial estate just out of town, one with the right approximate dimensions and an east-facing window. It took him three days to gather what he needed. He installed blinds, cut and laid a carpet, painted the walls. He brought in a desk the right height from Office Supplies and a monitor, a keyboard, an extra set of shoes and a suit. He played a recording of work-day sounds made at the corporation and played it on a loop.
The other lots were used for storage or by artists. He came in carrying a briefcase and a coffee and walked briskly, greeting anyone he met with a curt ‘Hello’ or ‘Good morning’. He sat at the desk and tried to forget who he was and to live as Carlos had. Each time, to begin with, he broke off quickly and turned his attention back to the construction of the room. He believed the problem was fabric; the room wasn’t built right yet. Once the duplicated space had been correctly established he could run an accurate simulation of the working day. To make the room feel used he rolled in it and ate lots and spoke nonsense monologues, anything really, the thing was just to get words out. The keyboard was new; that was a problem, but there was nothing he could do other than just be at it: there was no way of speeding that up.
The garage was damp and poorly lit. The noise coming in from outside was unreasonable. The harsh heat made him sweat at his desk. He couldn’t imagine what it was the other occupants were doing in the places they rented. He heard people pacing, talking aloud to themselves. To block this out he turned up the office audio. He had arranged for the agency to send over several performers in the guise of colleagues and prospective clients. This was to help him feel the place really was a working office. He wasn’t sure what the performers had been told. He gave his name as Carlos and no one said a thing, although chance had it that at least one was involved in an interaction at the corporation.
The possibilities afforded by the use of the performers were impressive. There was nothing, for instance