Memory Transplant
For the thousandth time, Lukas Graham regretted making a donation to a funeral home.
The Armani Haute Couture suit was soaking up mold and mildew from the formalin mist as he slashed the zipper of the body bag with solid gold cufflinks. Under the cooler's blue light, the face unlike his own was oozing fluorescent liquid -- the glowing nanotracer Emma had injected into the clone's veins.
"DNA similarity 99.99%, brain synapse memory replication complete." The coroner's robotic hand suddenly flipped 180 degrees, disliking the plate to the tip of his nose. The holographic report pulsed with a familiar EKG: heartbeat data from last Christmas Eve's yacht tryst with Leah, accurate to the hormonal fluctuations per second.
"This can't be right!" Lucas smashed the tablet, but the splattered glass slag levitated to form a QR code. The phone automatically scans and the surveillance video from the top floor of Graham Tower begins to play: five of "him" signing different merger and acquisition agreements at the same time, and the handwriting identification software pops up with a green "100% authentic" pop-up.
The funeral parlor suddenly plays the intro to Chopin's "Raindrops". It's the cell phone ringtone he set early in the morning after his first night with Emma, but now it's coming from the depths of thirty coolers. As Lucas frantically lifted the neighboring body bags, each clone had an old Nokia implanted in its chest, the screen displaying bed photos of different mistresses.
"How was the gaming experience?" The central air conditioner suddenly spewed out the scent of iris. Lucas knocked over the autopsy table as he stumbled back, and the scalpel made a perfect parabola through the air, piercing the eyeball of one of the clones -- the very same limited edition Tiffany scalpel from 2015 that he had given to Emma as a token of his love.
The electrical system is paralyzed. The moment the emergency lights come on, all the cooler drawers pop open and thirty naked clones sit up like puppets on strings, the fluorescent lines under their skin spelling out Swiss bank accounts. They spoke in unison, their voices like perfect replicas corrected by AI: "March 15, 2016, payment of 357 Bitcoins to Senator..."
Lucas copied the fire extinguisher and smashed it into the nearest clone. Instead of brains, a rain of encrypted chips explodes as the head shatters -- each storing enough recordings of the bribe to put him in the electric chair. As he stomped on the chip-strewn floor, the marble floor of the funeral parlor was suddenly electrified, and Emma's verdict floated in blue light: "Sentence Memory to life imprisonment."
"You're just code!" He ripped off his Patek Philippe and smashed it into the security probe. The dial cracks into the shape of a sundial on impact, projecting a countdown: 23 minutes until the SEC raid. At the same time, the clones are ripping open their chests in synchronization, removing artificial hearts engraved with the laser code V-ERONICA-α.
Most frightening of all is clone 17. It comes staggering up, pulls a bloodied USB stick from its throat and inserts it into a fire hydrant connector. The entire wall turned into a display showing images he'd never seen before: his mother pushing the real Lucas into a frozen lake on his eighth birthday, disguising the clone as a miracle of resurrection from drowning.
"Biometric failure." The sudden sound of a mechanical female voice made his blood freeze. Lucas lunged for the pupil scanner, only to see that the iris lines were mutating -- those genetic traits faked with the nanobots were being erased by the system. As he frantically licked the fingerprint lock, his tongue tasted a familiar bitterness -- a blocker in the goodnight black tea Emma always made him.
The clones suddenly burst en masse. Flesh and blood vaporized into a spray of DNA in the air, and the funeral home's fresh air system began to loop a recording of his confession. Lucas felt his way through the rain of blood to the emergency exit, only to find a wedding ring with blue diamonds embedded in the doorknob, and the cloned embryos imprisoned inside pleading for help in pupil Morse code.
As the sirens sound from far away, the skylight suddenly lowers a sling. The moment Lucas grabs the lifeline, he realizes it's a gallows transformed by Emma from her wedding dress. Inside the veil dangling at the knot, a holographic projection is broadcasting live from Capitol Hill as "he" commits perjury, while the real killer holds up a syringe off-camera -- containing a mixture of Leah's eggs and cloned spinal fluid.
When SWAT breaks down the door, Lucas is kneeling in a pool of blood and laughing. He rips open his shirt to reveal the iris tattoo on his left chest, under which lies the memory chip implanted three hours earlier. The SWAT team's pupil-recognition system suddenly reported an error, as the irises of all the commandos, all of them, flashed the emerald-colored patches of light characteristic of the Graham family.
"You guys are products too." He lifted his skull at gunpoint to reveal the brain-computer interface being decoded. As tear gas filled the space, the clone's flesh and blood began to reorganize, spelling out a new probate code on the floor -- the beneficiary read: the Veronica Arts Foundation.
The front page of the Wall Street Journal the following day was chilling: the completion of the digital migration of all Graham Group assets, and the neural map at the helm of the AI was a model of Lucas's brainwaves as he collapsed at the funeral home. Even more treacherously, when a reporter clicks on the CEO's ID photo, what jumps up is a link to a paid live stream of Emma's burn treatment period.
And in the Chelsea underground lab, the three hundred and first clone is being injected with a memory serum. The monitor screen outside the incubation chamber shows Lucas' last EKG, while the operations log is labeled, "Item number V-ERONICA-β, Availability: Leah's due date."