One Step Behind by Galen Surlak-Ramsey

Author:Galen Surlak-Ramsey [Surlak-Ramsey, Galen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tiny Fox Press
Published: 2020-08-25T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

Rocked World

I’m pretty sure my brain had a hard reset because some ungodly amount of time had to have passed before I realized Tolby was waving a paw in my face while the others had moved a good three meters away from me.

“Dakota? Can you hear me?” he said before tapping me on the shoulder.

“Guess she’s catatonic,” Jack said with a shrug. “And that’s not Dakota. Not our Dakota at least. Now what do we do with her?”

At that point, I managed to completely snap out of it all. I blinked. I swore. I shook my head and repeated the whole process a few more times, and then once again for good measure to make sure the loop had five iterations instead of four. God, could you imagine the mess I’d have found myself in if I’d wound up doing that? Ew. My skin crawls just thinking about it, and I’d probably have to rub Taz’s belly for a month straight just to counteract all that bad luck.

“I’m sorry. I’ve clearly had a brain aneurism,” I managed to spit out. “Say that again?”

“Of course, madam,” Mandred said, still as smooth and accommodating as ever. “The woman over there is the original Dakota Adams. You are the clone, not even a week old by your standards of measurement.”

I heard everything he said. The neurons in my brain fired the audio signals to the right places of gray matter, and my bone-encased organic computer even managed to send the meaning of those words to the correct areas of gray matter as well, where they were processed accordingly. Despite all that, Mandred was wrong. I knew it. We all knew it.

I lunged for the little device he held. “Let me see that,” I said, ripping it from his grasp. Looking back, I’m surprised he gave it up so readily given his hostile reaction to Tolby’s demand to see the Progenitor tech they’d kept. Maybe it was a customer-service subroutine in his programming that let me do it. After all, from his point of view, he had a huge sale riding on all this. Whatever it was, I got the device, but I’ll be a quadruplet-loving couch potato if I understood a damn thing it showed.

“Would you like me to interpret the results?” Rummy asked after a few moments of me staring blankly at the screen.

“Does that involve me listening to one of your sales pitches?”

“No, but now that you mention it, we are having a forty-percent discount sale on Mem-Loss, your premier pill for ridding yourself of any and all unwanted memories. Furthermore, if you act now and subscribe to our monthly delivery, you can save an additional five percent as well as enjoy free shipping to all orders within the Kappa-Seven quadrant. Would you like to know more?”

“Just tell me this thing is lying.”

“This thing is lying.”

Despite his immediate reply, my throat tightened, and tears welled in my eyes. “You’re lying, aren’t you?”

“No, I’m following instructions,” he said. “Studies have shown

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