The man stuck a finger in one of my nostrils and turned my head so I was facing him. He said, "They don't want me to hurt you, asshole. If they find a bruise on you, I'll be in deep shit."

Then he placed his hand so that his palm covered my mouth as he pinched my nose. I could not breathe or struggle.

"Franklin, stop it," the girl said. "Stop it!"

He pulled his hand from my mouth, then he leaned so low that our faces almost touched, and he said, "See that, asshole. I can kill you with one hand behind my back."

He stood, laughed, and fixed his hair. He said, "Look, Sunny, he's drooling. Think he's drooling for you?"

I could not see her reaction; she had stepped out of my field of vision. I heard her say, "Go away."

"Tell you what, Sunny, you and me...why don't we do a little dance on that gurney once he's through with it."

"Get specked," she said.

He laughed, and said, "Exactly."

Of all the people I had met up to this point in my life, this "Franklin" was the one I wanted to kill the most. I lay on that cold gurney, on my back, my face pulled to one side. I could not control so much as a muscle in my body. I could not swallow. Drool leaked from my mouth.

Trying to sound professional and in control, the girl, Sunny, said, "He's on the table. I can take it from here."

"Oh, but he's so much fun. I want to stay."

"Do I need to report you? What do you think Silas will say if I tell him you're endangering the program? What do you think he'll say when I tell him that it's your fault that Wayson is starting to remember?"

"Maybe he'll let me kill him," Franklin said. He tried to sound confident, but I heard worry in his voice.

So did the girl. She said, "Do you think he'll have you transferred or shot? Maybe he'll flush you through the moon pool with the rest of the garbage."

"Just when do you think you are going to talk to Silas?" the bastard asked.

"Tonight," Sunny said, sounding confident.

"What makes you think you'll live that long? Who's going to protect you? All you have is the dummy, and he can't even protect himself. I could kill you in front of him, and he wouldn't remember. I could kill you and say he did it."

"Are you threatening me?"

"Take it any way you like," he said. "You want rough, I can give you rough. You want sweet, baby, I can be sweet. I'll give it to you any way you like."

Having shown he was not afraid, the bastard turned and strutted out of the cell. I was able to see him leave only because he had turned my head in the right direction.

The girl said, "Don't worry about Franklin. He won't hurt you. He can't touch you. You are the most important man down here, Wayson."

The girl...Sunny, wheeled the gurney down a brightly lit hall and into a long, large room. The tables and furniture reminded me of an operating room, but the place was huge.

There was a row of occupied incapacitation cages along the wall. Incapacitation cages weren't really cages, they were gurneys with electric diodes. The men on those gurneys, all of them clones, lay motionless, rendered helpless by electricity channeled from the gurney into the napes of their necks. The electricity made their muscles contract.

I looked at the men as she wheeled me past. They were dressed in surgical gowns, their legs stretched out, their feet a shoulder's width apart. If they'd been standing instead of lying down, I would have described them as being at "parade rest."

Someone had implanted metal filaments into the necks of the men on the incapacitation cages. The filaments channeled the electricity into their spines so that even a small electrical charge left them helpless. They were aware of everything around them and paralyzed from the neck down. As the girl rolled me past them, a couple of the clones even muttered something.

"It would be so much easier on everyone if you were more like them, Wayson," Sunny said. "But don't worry, we won't treat you like that. We want to keep you perfect. No holes. No burns. No wires. You see, Wayson, you get VIP treatment. You're very important to us."

We passed rows and rows of men on gurneys. There might have been a thousand of them. There might have been fifteen hundred. Fifteen hundred less two, I thought. We lost two men in the grand arcade.

She rolled me into a private room, and whispered, "We don't want anyone to interrupt us, dear." She stroked my arm, then she reached her hand into my pants.

Under other circumstances I might have enjoyed her attentions. Her hands were smooth and warm and soft, and she knew all the right spots. But I did not like her taking advantage of my paralysis. The term "rape" came to mind. So did the term "violated," but those were not terms Marines used to describe their situation.

If I had not been paralyzed, I might have willingly joined in...and yet...and yet...there was something in the back of my mind, something subconscious, maybe even deeper seated than the subconscious. I hated this woman. She repulsed me. And I feared her, too.

She was beautiful and her touch was warm and she had protected me from Franklin, but I hated her; and it wasn't just that she had captured me.

"Don't worry about Franklin. He won't hurt you. I won't ever let him hurt you."

I felt her warm hands around my genitals. If it weren't for the feeling of nausea and helplessness, it might have been erotic. She squeezed a couple of times until my body began to react, and then I felt a sharp, stabbing pain that did not go away. She had clamped something cold and sharp to my scrotum.

She leaned over me so that her face was an inch from mine, and she smiled. "There now, that wasn't so bad." She moved her mouth to my ear, and whispered, "You know, I don't have to massage you like that."

She kissed me, not on the lips but on the forehead.

I was raised in an orphanage for clones. Before I learned that I was a clone, I believed that I had once had a mother and a father, and I used to dream about my mother kissing me on the forehead, right between my eyes, in the very spot that this woman had just kissed me.

Next she strung a long, thin breathing tube beside the gurney. She clipped the tube to the bottom of my nose.

She said, "This isn't going to be pleasant, Wayson. But lucky you, you won't remember a thing."

The pain was so searing, that I thought my eyes might roll out of their sockets. The world seemed to turn to the color of lightning, but I managed to hold on to one thought...one thought...Anything that can be programmed can be reprogrammed.

During my last instant of awareness, I realized that I was what had been programmed. I was a clone.

CHAPTER.

FOURTEEN.

I woke up in a cell. Even before I opened my eyes, I knew it would be a civilian facility instead of a brig. I kept my eyes shut and eked out the details from the fused clay of my brain. The room would be small with no windows and a rubberized airtight seal around the door. The air would come through a ridge of discreet vents at the base of the wall. There would be a toilet with chrome pipes and a ceramic sink. There would be a beautiful blue-eyed woman with a soft smile who would be kind to me, but her kindness came with pain. Her touch was warm and filled with venom. There would be a man who wanted to torture me.

I opened my eyes and sat on my rack.

The room was precisely as I had imagined...not remembered, imagined. To the best of my knowledge, I had never entered this cell; but here I was. I must have been in here before, or I would not have known the details. Maybe I woke up as the pretty woman and the sociopath dragged me in.

What other details could I think of? The man's name was Franklin. He looked like a movie star and fussed with his hair. If I could, I would hurt him; but I knew I could not hurt him. I could not understand why, but I knew I was no threat to him.

I imagined a room filled with clones, too. At first I dismissed it as a stray memory from my childhood-an orphanage dormitory with hundreds of clones sleeping on rows of racks. As I tried to grab hold of the image in my mind, I saw that the clones were grown men.

"Anything that can be programmed can be reprogrammed," I whispered. Then I added something else. I said, "Even me."

Something had happened to me. Somebody had done something to me, and they had tried to erase it from my memory; but I had held on to these images.

In my head, people and emotions ran together. The girl with the liquid blue eyes represented torment, and I wanted to kill her. I wanted to kill her every bit as much as I wanted to kill Franklin. I had a strange pseudosexual fantasy about strangling her and kissing her on the forehead as she gasped for breath. The thought was repulsive and seductive at the same time.

What was happening to my mind? Was this reprogramming?

I felt weak. When I stood, the world seemed to spin. My throat did not feel dry, and I was not especially hungry. I tried to remember the last time I had eaten. I'd had a meal on the Churchill. Was that a day ago? Was it a month ago? Was Cutter searching for me, or had he written me off as dead?

Don Cutter had been at the meal. The bastard questioned me. He undermined my authority. I wanted to kill him. Did I hate him as much as I hated Franklin and the girl? Sunny. Her name was Sunny. I wanted to kill Sunny. I wanted to choke her. I wanted to kiss her as she gasped her last breath.

Warmth ran through my body. I was having a combat reflex. With the warmth came clarity of thought. I realized that I was supposed to hate Don Cutter. Somebody wanted me to hate him.

I was not supposed to hate Sunny. I think I was supposed to love her and fear Franklin, but I was not supposed to remember them. I was not supposed to remember this cell.

"Legion," I said to myself. "I am not Legion, I am not possessed by Legion. I am not one of the swine that ran into the sea." I whispered so softly, Sunny could not have heard me if she'd pressed her ear to my lips.

"Sunny," I said. I would kill her. I would kill Franklin. I would not kill Cutter. They were programming me to hate him, but I would not give in.

The seal around the air lock broke, and a faint chemical scent trickled in. I did not expect my body to turn limp, but a familiar feeling of helplessness entered my brain as I tumbled to the ground. I lay there, staring straight ahead, unable to do so much as blink my eyes.

The girl walked in, and so did the man. I could only see their feet, but I knew who they were. She said, "He's awake again. That's so odd. It's supposed to put him to sleep."

"Maybe he's fighting it," said Franklin. He knelt in front of me and turned my head so that my eyes stared directly into his. He was a young man, maybe in his late twenties, maybe in his thirties. He asked, "Are you putting up a fight? Are you in there?"

I remembered his face. I remembered his face vividly. He looked exactly as I expected, green eyes, jutting jaw, smooth skin. I would hold on to that face. No matter what happened, I would hold on to the image. Nothing short of death would make me forget this man's face.

"Leave him alone, Franklin. I told Silas you were bullying him," said the girl. She had tried to be friendly, and now she turned angry. They did not like each other.

Franklin stood. He reached under my arms and hoisted me onto the gurney. He was short and trim and young and strong. I weighed two hundred pounds, but he lifted me as easily as he might have lifted a child.

I was helpless. If he'd wanted to, he could have snapped my neck. Instead, he played with me. He curled his forefinger under his thumb, and then he flicked it into my open right eye. His fingernail tapped against my eyeball.

He laughed, turned to the girl...Sunny, and asked, "Do you think he knows that I did that?"

"If you scratched his eye..."

"I didn't."

"Even a bruise or a chipped tooth..."

"I did not hurt him."

"I'll wheel him to the O.R. I can take it from here," she said in a pouty voice.

"I'll be specked, you really do have a thing for him. You're hot for the breathing cadaver."

She did not say anything.

As he left, Franklin said, "Maybe I should tell Silas about the two of you."

Silas, I thought. Remember the name Silas. He was another person I needed to kill.

From the moment I smelled the chemicals, my combat reflex had not stopped. Now it increased to battlefield proportions. I could feel the heat in my veins. I needed violence. Violence became more vital than breathing.

The girl walked around the table to examine me. I imagined myself strangling her. I imagined her lips forming a circle, her face turning purple, her mouth and tongue turning blue. I saw her eyes changing to glass, and I imagined myself kissing her as the death rattle escaped from her lungs. The thought was both sadistic and sexual. Cruelty and sexuality had never gone hand in hand in my thinking. I generally hated and occasionally loved but never had both feelings for anyone.

Sunny's smile was sweet, and her eyes were as liquid as I had imagined. I could lose myself in those eyes, and I saw her concern for my safety. What could she possibly have done to me? Why did I want to kill her?

She brushed the hair from my forehead, and said, "He can't hurt you, Wayson."

Her voice was soft and soothing. I caught a hint of peppermint spice in her breath. My muscles might not have worked, but my blood flowed, and my body betrayed my feelings. She reached down and stroked my crotch, and she whispered, "You're at attention."

Sunny wheeled the gurney through the halls and into a large medical facility, the one I had known we would enter, the one with rows of men. This was not like the barracks in the orphanage, it was a torture chamber. The men did not lie on military racks, they were stretched out on incapacitation cages. Fine metal filaments had been drilled into their skulls. The filaments conducted electricity into their spines. These men were alive and alert and as helpless as me.

My combat reflex increased as images lined up in my head. I remembered the operating room and some of what would happen when we entered. She would arouse me, then there would be pain. I tried to struggle, but the only struggle was in my brain. My body ignored me.

We entered a room in which we were alone. She whispered to me, then she caressed me. She rubbed me and reached into my pants. Her touch was soft and she stared into my eyes...and I fought. I could not wiggle a finger or flutter an eye, but I put up a fight in my head.

She closed her hand around me. She tugged. She rubbed.

I thought about battles. I thought about men dying on bloody fields, Marines, clones, synthetic people like me. I once had a sergeant named Tabor Shannon. He was a Liberator. He was my mentor. He died in a cave on a planet called Hubble.

Her hand was warm. She stroked. She grasped. She pulled.

My first friend in the Marines was a clone named Vince Lee. We went on leave together to Hawaii. I saved his life during the battle of Little Man. Vince and I were two of the Little Man Seven-seven survivors from a force of two thousand.

Vince always suspected that he was a clone. He took a drug called Fallzoud that enabled him to live with the knowledge that he was synthetic, but the drug made him crazy. He died on a ship called the Grant. I helped kill him.

"Come now, sweetheart. Relax. Relax," Sunny purred.

I once loved a girl named Ava. She was a clone of an old movie actress. When the natural-borns exiled the clones from Earth, Ava came with me to a planet called Terraneau, and she loved me; but I did not love her the way she wanted to be loved. I was restless, and I wanted revenge.

She died alone in an apartment on an evacuated planet. I left her there to die. She wanted me to leave.

Sunny pressed herself against me. I could feel her body on top of mine. Her hair fell across my neck. Her lips brushed across mine, and I inhaled her breath. It smelled of peppermint and spice.

I had a friend named Ray Freeman. I went to Seattle to find him the night I killed those three men. I did not find him. I did find him. He told me that anything that can be programmed can be reprogrammed. He said there was a back door in my neural programming. He said my conscious mind could be switched off.

CRACK. Sunny's hand slapped across my face. Because my neck was relaxed, the force of the blow spun my head to the side.