Delphine Beraud is dead.
The first hints of spring are plainly visible out the window, bright greens and a flash of yellow daffodils. Delphine ignores them, leaning forward with interest in her chair.
"We wanted to make the offer in person," the man concludes, smiling conspiratorially. She breathes deeply, then leans back in her seat with a smile of her own.
"Of course I'll take it." She laughs lightly, incredulous. "How could I turn down a full scholarship and stipend?"
Delphine knew when she was eight that she wanted to be a doctor. Her academics have been stellar, and her doctoral work proves much the same.
With a heavier course load than most of her classmates and the prestigious scholarship from Dyad always in the balance, Delphine doesn't quite find the time to make friends. She doesn't mind. The offer included in the scholarship had been very clear:
"Do well with this and there will be a career with Dyad studying anything you can imagine."
She can imagine a great many things.
They hire in batches, groups of young doctors and nearly-doctors. Delphine's group includes no other immunologists, and she quickly loses track of them, caught up in her own work. They fly her to Toronto, secure visas and an apartment. Her chest aches to leave home. Her parents cry. Her job is to research a disease from tissue samples alone, no patient contact. She suspects it is a test.
She throws herself into it with the same ambition she has always had. Test or not, the samples don't make clinical or pathological sense; they shift between lymphomas and leiomyomas, malignant and benign. When she checks the DNA in a fit of frustration after fruitless months, she finds she has more than one patient, identical but not.
There are more levels of security, information protection, and management than she had thought probable before beginning with Dyad. It is two months before she even meets her boss instead of an underling on the same grade as Delphine. He is tall, gaunt with an internal fire, the sort of person she half expects to burn those around him. He is dangerously smart. He makes her ache, she thinks, to become him.
She takes the identical-not-identical DNA to his office, with printouts and a thumb drive with reports and the frustration of a thwarted academic.
Leekie's voice is like honeyed wine; Delphine drinks every drop.
"You've cracked it," he says, and he sounds proud, his eyes smiling. "You're quite right, they are different patients with the same disease and very nearly identical genetics."
"You could have told me I was doing a twin study!" She runs her hand through her hair, shaking her head and allowing it to resettle down her back in long waves.
He leans forward, still smiling. Delphine feels like a mouse caught under a cat's gaze. "Not quite that, but still. Very good. Let me know when you've worked it out completely."
There is a persistent rumour that to do the interesting work, the important work, Dyad makes you disappear, or maybe kills your family, or at least keeps you in a special wing away from the normal vaccine development and research labs. Delphine has never found the time to make friends here, either, bad habits from the rest of her life catching up at last. But she eats lunch in the kitchen with the others even if she reads the whole time, and she's heard the rumour, too.
Of course, it's nonsense. She is doing interesting, important work already, and no one has died.
The mismatched sequences don't code for anything at all. Junk DNA, identical in length and placement. Meanwhile her samples still refuse to cement themselves into anything diagnosable.
"I need to talk to them," she tells Leekie. It has been a year of this problem. Perhaps she is failing this test. "The patients. I will get this diagnosis, but I need to meet them. It is highly irregular for anyone to be able to make a diagnosis on tissue pathology alone when it is so, so, so variable!" She places her hands on his desk, leaning against it. "Please, I can do this, just let me meet them."
She expects protest, or annoyance, or anything at all except that same sly smile he wears when he thinks she is clever. He raises his eyebrows.
"Delphine. Dr. Beraud. Please sit." She does, eyes wide at the formality. "You've done excellent work so far. I don't have any complaints about you as a researcher." He spreads his hands across the table, palms up and open. "I think it's time we increased your security clearance. You may well be right: you cannot progress without subject interaction." He sighs. "Unfortunately, there are complications that come with a higher security clearance."
She raises her eyebrows. "Such as?"
He breaks eye contact, glancing out the window. Spring in Toronto is just as green as at home, but a different green, with different light.
"You currently posses the highest clearance we can give to people we simply employ. To proceed beyond this requires a...a commitment to Dyad. Your work touches on highly classified, protected information. Information which could devastate a number of other projects with the slightest breath of a leak."
"I wouldn't tell if it's classified, Aldous." She is offended, outraged. He shrugs.
"It's very interesting work. It would be difficult to say anything about your job to, perhaps, your parents without some disclosure, which would contradict the security clearance. Think of it as like being a spy. You, as a person outside of Dyad, cease to exist." He pauses, though not nearly long enough for his implication to sink in. "Dr. Beraud, you have been working with tissue samples from human clones."
The wood grain of his desk holds Delphine's attention as she sorts through all of this information, testing it to find weaknesses. When she looks up, she isn't sure how much time has passed. Her eyes meet his, her jaw set.
"Dr. Beraud will not be leaving this office, one way or another, Delphine." She hears the threat for what it is. He watches her, all cat again. She finds all of the sudden that she is sick of being his mouse.
"I will need a new identity?"
"Yes." Proud again.
"Cormier." Delphine Beraud would have explained herself, told a story about her maternal grandmother for whom she was named. She would have shared with Leekie, the closest thing to a friend she has known in years. Instead, she leans back in her chair, mirroring his posture, and raises her eyebrows. "Dr. Delphine Cormier."
Delphine Beraud is dead.