It was a four hour train trip, and then I took a car to the address Abby had given me. I thought at first that she had made a mistake, because the road I took led me increasingly further into the woods, until there was nothing around me but trees. But as it turns out, somewhere in the middle of the forest, there was actually a house.

1440 Whitewood Lane was a large, two story white house with — surprisingly enough, — no windows. It was rather well hidden, too, one could easily drive past it and not notice it at all, especially since it was surrounded by a tall hedge.

I walked past the open gates, up to the marble doorstep, then rang the doorbell.

After waiting for about a minute or so, the door slid open, revealing a small foyer with white walls and white marble flooring. There was nobody there.

“Hello?” I called. I took a step in, and the door closed behind me. “I’m coming in,” I announced. “Is anyone home?”

Carefully, I took a few steps toward the center of the room. The door opposite me slid open, as if inviting me to go through. The wise thing to do would be to go back, or rather, maybe I should have never entered the house in the first place. But I was never very wise. How it was that natural selection allowed for such a careless and curious person to exist was beyond my knowledge.

I went through the door, and into what was probably the living room. It was an ample space, with antique-style wooden furniture and landscape paintings hanging on the walls. There really were windows on the inside, although the landscape beyond them looked nothing like the forest outside, from what I gathered those were probably displays showing some other place, a grassy field with thick mist in the air.

“Lucia Esther Oliveira, what a surprise.”

The voice had come from somewhere behind me. I turned to look, and saw an elderly man coming in my direction. I knew instantly that this was Jonathan Porto, the man I had come to find. He looked older in person than on the pictures I had seen, and his hair and beard were both somewhat disheveled, but his facial features were unmistakable.

He stopped his wheelchair a meter or so away from me.

“What a surprise,” he repeated.

“Hello Mr. Porto,” I said, politely.

“Oh, please, just call me Liam. That’s how most people know me, anyway. Before I ask you what brings you here, would you kindly place any electronic device you have on you inside that box over there?”

He pointed at a large white box next to the door. I did as he told me, and put my lens and phone in there.

“Your coat, too, if you will,” he said.

Hesitantly, I took my coat off, and placed it into the box with the rest of my stuff. The lid closed on its own, once I had done that.

“Very well,” said the old man. “Follow me, please.” He turned his wheelchair around, and drove it to the other end of the room. We walked through another door into a smaller room with couches. I sat down. Liam took two cups from a cupboard nearby, and placed one on the coffee table in front of me. “Tea, coffee or water?” he asked.

“Um… water, please.”

He filled my cup with water, and his with tea.

“You’re a resourceful woman, miss Lucia. I don’t normally make myself easy to locate.”

“Oh, hm…” I couldn’t tell him about Abby, since what she’d done for me wasn’t technically legal. “I… have my ways, I guess?”

Liam smiled. “It seems so,” he said. “Now… what brings the daughter of Giuseppe Oliveira to my humble abode?”

“Tell me about the white rose,” I said.

The smile in Liam’s face waned. “Who told you about that?”

I shrugged. I probably shouldn’t tell him about Helena either, right? “We may have a mutual friend,” I suggested.

“That’s not very good, miss Lucia,” said Liam, sipping his tea and looking around, seemingly distraught. “Our mutual friend is far too careless to speak about this with you. Do you know what you’re getting yourself into?”

I couldn’t give him an answer, because honestly, I had no idea what the whole thing about a white rose was. So I told him what I knew.

“They seem to think my father was murdered,” is what I said.

“Well,” said Liam, “there’s that too.”

There was a moment of silence. I had no idea what to ask him about, and Liam himself didn’t seem willing to disclose anything, so we just sat there, facing each other, for a time that was far too long for comfort. Eventually, he picked up his cup of tea again, sipped it, and asked me:

“Have you met her?”

“Met who?” I asked, confused.

“The white rose, of course.”

“I… can’t say I have,” I admitted.

He smiled. “And here I was thinking that we’d just have a carefree conversation about your father, but of course I should have known you meant business. You’ve grown, little Lucia. Last time I saw you, you were still playing with dolls. Whereas I can’t say I’ve changed all that much, since then. Time is a funny thing, isn’t it?”

I smiled. I honestly didn’t remember ever having met Liam before, but I do remember some of my father’s coworkers coming to have dinner at our place, every now and then, he must have met me then.

“I’ll tell you what I can,” said Liam, “for two reasons: One, I owe your father a great many favors, that I do. And two, you’re in real danger here, going around and asking people the wrong things, and I don’t want you to meet the same fate as your ol’ pa. So I’ll tell you, and I’ll warn you…” he served himself more tea. “You do know that most replicas that get rejected are disassembled, I’m sure. We salvage their parts to use in other replica projects. That used to be my job, by the way.”

I nodded. “But not all of them, right?”

Liam smiled. “Not all of them, yes. And our dear white rose is one of those exceptions. As for your question, of who she is, that’s all you need to know.” I was ready to protest, to ask him more about that, but he didn’t let me. “Now for the warning,” he said. “Would you kindly look at that screen?”

Liam pointed at a screen on the other side of the room. It was a camera recording of me in the foyer of his house, earlier. I hadn’t noticed that there was a camera there. But it seems I wasn’t just been filmed, I was being scanned. Red markings on the footage indicated my lens and phone, as well as a small something on the lapel of my coat, something I didn’t recognize. Along with the markings, a label indicated what they were. I read the label beside the object on my coat, it had an alpha code, like the ones commonly used for electronic devices, but I had no idea what it meant.

“What is that?” I asked, surprised.

“What, indeed…” said Liam. “Look closer.”

The old man extended his hand, and placed a tiny black object on the table in front of me. It was flat and round, like a coin, but much smaller. I picked it up, and inspected it. It was smooth and seemed to have no noteworthy features.

“I’ve never seen this before,” I said.

Two seconds later, I heard my voice echoed back to me by the speakers in the room. “I’ve never seen this before,” I heard myself say. I turned to look at the image on the screen, and saw that it had changed into a satellite map image, showing a forest canopy and what seemed to be a house covered in solar panels. An image overlay showed a road labeled “Whitewood Lane,” and an arrow beside it was labeled “1440”.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I said, and two seconds later, heard that played back to me as well. Liam laughed, then closed the screen. I looked between him and the device in my hand, stunned. “This shit’s in my coat?” I asked. “Why?”

“Standard Cyan protocol,” Liam explained. “Watching for potential threats. It’s not just you, of course, they have surveillance on everyone that’s related to their employees or their replica subjects. Children, even. Don’t bother about the coat. If you take off the microphone, they’ll just find another way to watch over you. There’s probably cameras in your house, anyway.”

I sat back and waited for that to sink in. So Cyan Four had been spying on me? Since when? Given that my father was already working for them when I was born, it might have been all my life.

“Therefore my warning,” said Liam. “These are some dangerous people you’re dealing with. You don’t want these people as your enemies. They may not consider you a threat right now, otherwise they wouldn’t have sent you over with just a microphone and a GPS tracker. But if you go around digging up dirt on Cyan, that’s going to change. So be smart, child, and forget about this white rose stuff. It’s not worth it.”

I felt my eyes begin to water, and realized that I was shaking. I was angry. Angrier than I’ve ever been before.

“Did Cyan kill my father?” I asked, sputtering the words.

For a moment, Liam didn’t answer. His face looked saddened, but I didn’t care. I would force an answer out of him if I had to.

“Did Cyan Four Laboratories kill my father?” I tried again, sounding even angrier than the first time.

“I can’t answer that,” he said, then paused for a bit, and continued: “…because I don’t know. I wasn’t there when he died. But if they did, it wouldn’t be the first time. Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?”

There was a long moment of silence. I inhaled deeply a few times, until the anger began to subside.

“Thank you for your time and hospitality, sir,” I told him, some of my anger still lingering on the words. I got up, turned around, and made way to the door.

“Lucia,” he called me. I stopped when I was just under the doorway, but didn’t look back. I just waited. “It’s not worth it,” he said, finally.

I didn’t answer. I just left the room in silence, got back my stuff — including the coat — and went outside into the woods again.