I was inside the train going south to the destination that stranger had given me. I had followed their instructions: leave all your devices at home, buy and wear new clothes and shoes, don’t use any personal ID cards, and don’t tell anyone where you are going. Quite a dangerous set of rules. I should have probably feared for my life, but I didn’t.

Timothy Parker, an eight-year-old child who had died of leukemia, “brought back” into life by replication, and the first human replica to ever have been made. He was rejected by his family, mainly due to a mistake by the research team, who shut him down for maintenance and in the process lost some of his memory. That was twelve years ago, and the current Timothy Parker should be about twenty or twenty-one now, even if his “shell”, the robotic body that hosted his replica AI, still looked like an eight-year-old child.

Timothy ran away from Cyan Four Laboratories several years ago, and according to the stranger, Cyan had no knowledge of his current whereabouts. Still, somehow, I had been given a time and place to meet him: nine a.m. at the town square of a small city in the South. If the stranger was telling the truth, that’s where I would find him.

Several questions were in my mind just them. The most crucial of them was: what if I was being tricked, and was about to walk into a trap? They’ve probably killed my father, and now they might have also killed Liam, who has warned me to stay away from all that. It would just make sense that they’d come for me next. Now, suddenly an anonymous person with access to confidential Cyan files starts messaging me and telling me to go somewhere else all alone and in secret. That was as fishy as it could get.

On the other hand, nine a.m. at a town square was way too public a setting for kidnapping or murder. There would be other people all around me, all witnesses. So I might as well go and figure out what all of this was about.

When I got there, I had to wait for over an hour, until somebody came to talk to me. And the person who did that wasn’t T. P., but rather a girl about my age. She stopped next to the bench where I sat, and spoke.

“Lucia Oliveira… that’s you, right?”

I nodded. “And you are?”

“I’m not telling,” said the girl. “I don’t trust you. Come on.”

The girl started walking away from me. I hastily got up to follow her. There was a car parked on the street next to the square. She told me to get in. I hesitated. This was getting more dangerous. I wished I had brought some sort of weapon along, like a knife. The way it was, if I did get involved into a fight of some sort, I didn’t stand a chance.

But I did get in the car, along with the girl. We rode for a few kilometers until it stopped by a large apartment building. There, the girl led me to the fifth floor, and opened the door to me there.

“Come in,” she said, walking into the apartment ahead of me. “Hey, Tim!” she called, when we were inside. “Your guest is here.”

A boy showed up under the doorway opposite us. I knew at once that this must be T. P., and a strange feeling took over me. I was meeting with someone whom I’ve only ever heard of, before, the first replica.

“Sit down,” he told me. His voice sounded like a child’s, still, since his shell was still the one that had been made for him during replication, and he was only eight at the time. I knew, however, that he must be older than myself. I sat on a chair that was nearby, and he sat by a table that was filled with electronic parts, like wires and chipsets, all connected together. The girl who had brought me there, the one that didn’t tell me her name, she just leaned against a wall and glared at me. “So, Lucia… Johnny seems to trust you. What are looking for?”

“Who’s Johnny?” I asked, confused.

“The person who contacted you,” said Timothy. “It’s a ‘John Doe’, right? So I call them Johnny, for simplicity.” I nodded, amused. “Now, answer me,” he said, and then repeated his question: “What are you looking for.”

I knew what he meant by that. He wanted to know why I was there, talking to him, or getting involved with all this business about Cyan Four Laboratories.

“I want to find out if my father was murdered,” I answered, honestly. “He… was a researcher in Cyan. I think they might have killed him.”

“I see…” said the boy. “Well… What if they did kill him? What are you going to do about it, then?”

That question surprised me a little. I haven’t really thought about what I would do after I found out the truth. So, I just said the first plausible thing that came to my mind.

“Then I want them to pay for it,” is what I said, but as soon as the words escaped my mouth, I realized how shallow they seemed.

Was this all that I wanted? Revenge?

“No, that’s wrong,” I said, rethinking my response. “The truth is… I want them to stop. Whatever secret Cyan Four’s keeping, it’s not worth anyone’s life. I want them to stop killing people. I want them to stop spying on me, my mom and everyone else. And… I don’t want Helena to die.”

Speaking my real motivations gave me a bit of relief, but a moment later I began to feel apprehensive about everything I had just said.

“Is this Helena Norwood you’re talking about?”

I nodded, feeling miserable.

“Is she a relative of yours?” he asked.

“No, actually…” I felt myself blush a little. “She’s my girlfriend.”

Timothy’s eyebrows went up a little, in surprise. He nodded, slowly. “Okay,” he said. “I think I understand. So… you want to find out whatever secret Cyan’s hiding, and you want to use that against them, somehow, is that it? To stop them from killing Helena Norwood, or any more people. But do you have any idea how you’re going to do all that? What’s your plan?”

I thought about it for a moment. I didn’t have a plan, so much as trying to figure out everything that Cyan had been hiding from me for all these years. “I don’t know yet,” I told Timothy. “I figured I should try to discover the truth about my father, first. And someone told me to try to find out about the white rose.”

Timothy seemed unfazed. “What’s that?” he asked.

“Hm… She’s a rejected replica,” I told him, “she wasn’t shut down, just like you and Helena. And her name’s Rosa Alba. Helena said I should try to find out the story about her.”

“Something you told me right now is wrong,” said Timothy.

“Huh?” I asked, confused. “What is?”

“I have been shut down,” he explained. “Several times. You might hear that I’m the first replica ever built, but that’s not true. I’m the seventh, at least. Come over here, I wanna show you something.”

Timothy started fiddling with the electronic components on the desk. I got up from the chair and approached him. A screen lit up, and in it, I saw a recording of a white room filled with desks and people in lab coats. The familiar Cyan Four Laboratories logotype was displayed in the front pockets of the coats. I immediately recognized one of the researchers: It was Liam, only several years younger, and maybe looking a little healthier.

Then I heard Timothy’s voice in the recording.

“Where am I?” said the voice.

“Hello, Timothy,” said a middle-aged man. He was looking straight at the camera. “Do you remember me?”

“Um… yeah…” said Timothy’s voice. “You’re doctor Cyan.”

“Excellent,” said the man. “I’d like to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind.”

The man then started asking him all sorts of questions. “What’s your full name? How old are you? Where do you live? What’s the name of this object in my hand? Can you count back from twenty?” I realized, as I continued to watch, exactly what it was that this video meant. It was a recording, seen through Timothy’s eyes, of himself waking up in one of Cyan Four’s labs, just after his replication.

Then Timothy skipped to a different recording. It was in a different laboratory room from the previous video, but it played a lot like the first one. “Where am I?” said Timothy’s voice. Once again, the man he’d called “doctor Cyan” comes around and starts asking him questions. It was definitely not the same recording from before, but the situation was identical.

After that, we moved to a third recording. It was back into the room for the first one, and it did start with Timothy’s voice asking “Where am I?”, but this time, it was a different person that came to ask him questions, some other researcher I didn’t know.

The fourth recording Timothy showed me had him in a much smaller room. He still wakes up saying “Where am I?”, and he’s still approached by the man called “doctor Cyan”, but this time the man doesn’t ask him nearly as many questions as before. He simply says “Oh, hello, Timmy. Your replication was a success. Can you walk? There’s somewhere I need to take you.”

“There’s a few more of these,” the real Timothy announced, beside me. “But they’re not much different from the ones I’ve shown you. You understand, don’t you?”

I was shaken. I knew what was going on. Helena had warned me about this once: she told us how Timothy’s family rejected him because, after being shut down for maintenance, he was initialized again with no memories of the first week he had spent as a replica. But this was bigger than that. It meant that Cyan didn’t just make that “mistake” once. They did it multiple times, knowingly.

“You were reset,” I said, stating the obvious. “From the original connectome… How many times was this?”

“I found seven of these in this tracker,” he said, pointing at a small, square shaped device that sat on the table before us. “But those are just the ones they recorded. Who knows how many more there were, before they started capturing it in video?”

“And you have no memory of these?” I asked.

“Well, obviously,” said Timothy. “Since each time, I was being run from the original map, the one they’d got from the organic Timothy. The only one I have memory of is the last one, because I ran away from their labs not too long after that, and they haven’t shut me down since.”

“Why did they do it?” I asked. “I mean, couldn’t they at least keep your memories?”

“I have my theories,” said Timothy. “I think they were testing me. The videos in this tracker, my first three years as a replica, I’ve watched all of that. Each time I was initialized, they ran me through several tests. I believe they were experimenting with my replica shell, trying to fine-tune the replication process itself…” He started playing other recordings on the screen, showing his time inside the Cyan Four facilities. “In that sense,” he explained, “I was their lab rat… You know that you can only compare two experiments if they both start from the same parameters, right? Well, my guess is that the easiest way for them to do this was to just start me from zero every time.”

The recording on the screen was showing several people wearing lab coats. I recognized one of them.

“Hey, wait, stop!” I said, pointing at the screen. Timothy froze the playback. I stared at the screen, startled.

“Someone you know?” he asked.

I nodded.

“My father,” I said. “The one on the left.”

Timothy looked at the screen, and then at me, and smiled.

“No kidding,” he said, sounding amused. “The father you mentioned before, the one you think was killed… that was Giuseppe? You’re Giuseppe’s daughter?”

I nodded. “Did you know him?”

Timothy chuckled. “Well, yeah, I did,” he said. “Your father saved my life.”

This time, it was I who felt surprised.

“Wha— really?” I asked, stuttering a little.

Timothy nodded. “Your father shut down my tracker for me, and helped me escape the facilities. I think that after three years of testing, Cyan didn’t have much use for me anymore. I remember Giuseppe telling me to go away and hide, because I’d be killed if I stayed. He was probably right, and because of that I owe him my life. But I had no idea he had died. How long ago was this?”

“Four years ago,” I told him. “His death didn’t make the papers. Cyan Four called my mom, one day, said it was a suicide. Helena thinks he was murdered.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” said Timothy. He did sound saddened to hear it. “I think… I’m beginning to understand why Johnny sent you to me. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

I shook my head. “Go ahead,” I told him.

“Well,” said Timothy, “I’m sure you must know this by now, but Jack Cyan and his company are keeping a close watch on every replica and every organic related to their work. This includes me, Helena, and you, since you’re Giuseppe’s daughter.”

“I know,” I told him. “I… visited Jonathan Porto… Liam… He warned me about this. And then the anon, Johnny, right? Well, they helped me with a few precautions.”

“I thought as much,” said Timothy. “I wouldn’t expect Johnny to send you over if they thought you were being tracked. Second question: Did you know all replicas have trackers inside them? It’s a device…” Timothy took the small square-shaped box from the table and held it up for me to see, “…that keeps track of everything we see and hear. Your father may have disabled this one, which was once inside me, but your girlfriend probably has one in her body as well. Anything she sees or hears, Cyan will know.”

I nodded. “Helena told me about it,” I said, and saw concern grow on Timothy’s face. “Well, not told me, exactly. She sent me the input diagram from her replication, disguised as something else. I figured about it from that.

Timothy’s eyebrows went up. “You can read replication diagrams?” he asked, stunned.

“Well… I did build a mouse replica, a few years ago,” I explained. “So I know a little bit about how these things go.”

“Maggie,” he called. The girl from before, the one that had brought me to T. P.’s apartment, walked up to him. “We need to teach her,” he said. The girl nodded.

“Wait, teach me?” I asked, confused. “Teach what?”

Timothy smiled. “Lucia, isn’t it?” he asked, and I nodded. “Well, I think I understand why Johnny thought you had to see me, now. You’re smart, you have the right motivations, and you’re probably better prepared than any of us for this challenge. But you’re up against some dangerous people. And I’m not just talking about Cyan Four, the company, but Jack Cyan, the man. As of right now, they have the upper hand. But Maggie and I, we’ve been in this game for longer than you have. We know how to evade their surveillance, and how to break into their systems. And we’re going to teach you just that.”