Jarod and Miss Parker need a worthy adversary to go against them and he has a black file because no one said what color his file was.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
He had been quite young when The Centre had taken him as it did other youngsters, who had not only a high intelligence, but also the ability to become anyone they wanted to be and an ability that did not die out in time.
He was among the special, the eight or rather the nine. The Centre gave each child, a special file, named after a color. His was black. Each child had a special instructor, and each instructor did not associate with the other and the instructors were to make the child completely dependant on him.
At night, they locked the children into separate rooms or rather cells, bare with not even a chair or a blanket. During the day, they took him to another room with a table, a chair, and a typewriter so he could type out his solutions.
When he became old enough, that is in his early thirties, the Centre found another space for him, and he found that there were others, at least two like him, a man named Jarod and another man named Edward. They were what remained of the special nine.
For a time, things continued as before, simulations, feeding, simulations, elimination of bodily fluids, and sleep. And there were small glimpses of horrors, of needles, and of pain showing up in nightmare that all three shared, not all the same, but different. However, as their trainers told them, this was to be expected, childhood dreams and nightmares, giving physical presence to an imaginary fear.
Then one night, Jarod persuaded them to escape. He had found out something that life in the Centre was not all good, that they were not free men, but belong to the Centre because of a certain gene in their makeup, the Pretender gene.
Therefore, when Jarod opened Ed's cell, being closer to him, Alex asked to go along and they fled. They climbed up the ladder to the next level, going higher and higher, until Alex fell.
He did not know how long he lay there, but he remembered waking up in the infirmary and that from now on his life changed. A man as dark as the night came in, looked him over. There were handshakes, papers and some jewels exchanged, and Alex found himself shipped out of the Centre, a hood placed over his head, handcuffed and manacled.
Alex did not know how long he stayed in that strange place. Only that his training took a sinister turn. He had been punished before, had felt the strikes on his back, had felt his stomach gnawing from hunger, and half remembered the torture, the pills that caused extreme nausea, the drug that increased pain, but not like this.
They had him naked, tied to a metal post, in the hot sun, with a chain around his neck, long enough to reach another man, bound, also naked, but blindfolded and he was to kill him, strangle him. When he tried to refuse, they tightened the chain. He could feel his throat tighten. He got the idea. The man died.
Each victim was different, a man, a woman, a boy, a girl, a toddler, and even an infant and they also trained him in different ways, so that soon, Alex could do anything. He was able to pass as a doctor, a lawyer, a stevedore, a pimp, a teacher, a bakery worker, a singer, etc. He had no morals, no compunctions, and was very charming, and this charm paid off.
It was night and after a particular job in which he was a truck driver, a truck driver who came into a bar and killed the new union boss so the former boss, loyal to the Triumvirate would get back in power.
That night, he climbed out the window of the hotel, and using his intelligence and resources, made it back to the States. Once in the States, he remembered his parents, and his sister. They were the reason why he was as he was. The only way he could rectify the situation and stay free of the Centre and the Triumvirate was to get rid of them and he did.
When the papers came out that someone had murdered an entire family, Alex was free. It was then that he met them.
They were like him, extremely intelligent, and could do more than he could. They knew who he was before they saw him, they were stronger, could jump from heights he never could attain. As he continued with them, however, he gained the same skills, but still remembered who had not helped him, those who were responsible for his being naked, forced to obey, chained like a dog in the hot South African sun.
That Jarod and Edward had gone through tortures just as horrid during their confinement in the Centre did not occur to Alex. He was the only one who suffered wrong.
He needed time to recover, to make his plans.
He learned one thing about his new friends, the Dominants or New Species as they called themselves, their intelligence surpassed the rest of mankind. One night, he entered a building and discovered in a secret room, that they were cloning a man.
At first, he wanted to inquire as to how, but decided against it. This required secrecy and so he observed. They took a sample of the man's DNA, and put it in a plastic tube, injecting another substance inside. Then they did something, he did not fathom. They inserted the tube into a large one, that in another one.
When they were not looking, he took one of the smaller tubes. He had it in his hand for a few minutes, when it dissolved. Not content with that experiment, he took a larger tube and although it took longer, it too disappeared, becoming a gaseous substance, odorless and invisible. Alex realized that as the clone grew, the container it was in became too small. It took a week in which he finally witnessed the clone.
It looked exactly like the original. It was a clone.
He soon learned how some clones were able to pass and others not. It was a thin, leading from the cortex of the originals, or a substitute. The original implanted his memories, while the substitute implanted theirs.
He also found that by entering sections of the brain, only certain memories were implanted. He learned where they stored the short-term memory, the long term memory, and the memory that was in between and unlike the homo sapiens, the time period when each occurred.
That was it. If he could clone himself, he could go anywhere and do anything. His clone would get the blame and his clone would be himself.
He had no idea what most clones were, but he learned that identical twins were rarer in the new species, the Chosen, or their leader having one as well as one of their lawyers, having two daughters who looked alike. They made most clones of this type when the original was just born or even extracting a cell out of one of the unborn infants. That, however, was risky since they had no idea what one of the four – they always had four infants at a time — had a clone. You had to be very important to have the process. Clones were not for ordinary Dominants and Alex was one.
It was hard to imagine that rather than being regarded as a superior being, highly intelligent who could mimic everyone, who just needed to look at a book and become a brain surgeon, but that's how it was. Alex came from the Dominants who originated in Poland and Russia, why even that lawyer was married to one, but they were just run of the mill ordinary Pretenders. He couldn't even claim that one of his ancestors was Anastasia or the Tsar of all Russia.
So when he learned enough, he used his Pretender skill to get into the laboratory and taking a needle, took some blood from under his fingernails and inserted it in the tube, along with the catalyst. He had no idea what it was, only it was not the nucleus of an egg, but he knew it made his duplicate grow and it did.
Alex knew that the Centre had implanted something in his brain just under his skull. He had seen the Centre doctors do it at the fertility clinic and he had stolen one. It was simple to keep it in a small container.
As soon as the clone was birth sized, Alex inserted the chip to his duplicate and put on the helmet that would transfer his thoughts and memories to it. The clone grew, and the tube dissolved, the clone became Alex. When he reached the stage before the others found him, he stopped but as soon as he did, the clone started to stir and saw himself.
That would not do. Alex realized that during the process of implantation, the clone was unconscious. Quickly, he reinserted the wire and waited until it was night when the others would return.
As soon as the door opened, Alex wrapped his double in a large blanket and said to the others, "The humans tried to kill him. I'm taking him to the Medical."
They let him pass and soon he and his clone disappeared.
Alex could not leave the clone without the implant, and usual drugs that rendered homo sapiens unconscious did not work. He had to use the drugs used to subdue large animals and while the clone slept, Alex went on his way to revenge himself against Jarod and the Centre, implanting that memory into the clone. The first thing he did was to kill Edward, but failed to find his son. The New Species got to the child before he did.
However, the boy soon found he was also of the New Species and told the others. Trapped Alex did the only thing he could. He revived the clone.
He watched as the clone, believing him to be Alex, reviled them, and found out the truth that he still was not free.
Not free? Alex thought. I am just as much property now as I was in the Centre?
He showed no mercy as they being just as strong as he, put the clone on the table, and removed the chip. Oh they used antiseptics and drugs, but still Alex could see himself suffer, could see himself scream in pain and he realized that it was himself dying.
He left for New York, met members of the Russian Mafia and soon rose to be one of their heads. He could not stay in the United States. He waited for his chance.
He needed someone who looked like him, but the only someone was a Boris who lived in Dublin, Ireland. To say it was a coincidence was true, a horrible coincidence for if Alex had not killed Boris, he would have stayed in the United States and would have eventually been eliminated by his own species.
As for what happened after he got there, the Dublin police knew of his rise to power, and his elimination of his enemies, real and imaginary.
Now he had learned that the Centre was now in control of Miss Parker and that lawyer and that Jarod was with them. All he had to do was to wait and waiting was something he did very well.