Word Count: 62,151

 

Walters was sitting, paying acute attention to the stranger, but not understanding. Supposedly, the man thought that he, too, was Greg Walters, and that he shared in the profession that Walters did. This could only have been true under the oddest of circumstances, and Walters knew that this was so completely unlikely that his stranger must have been suffering from some sort of amnesia.
 
The look on Carpenter’s face suggested that this man did not suffer from any sort of amnesia. He truly thought that he was Greg Walters.
 
“Greg Walters” was busy fetching them all some beverages to be polite, not having had any formal guests in a while, and not having seen anything like the lapel pin Genome for quite some time. It was mostly a vague memory, something from so far in the past that it was barely comprehensible anymore, but there was the gut feeling. Surrounding these odd pins seemed to be gut feelings. There was no more logic, only feeling, complete truthiness. Logic should have dominated the mind of a genetic scientist, but it did not. It should have dominated the mind of an alteration expert, but it did not.
 
The other Walters looked far more disoriented and klutzy than the true Walters. Once he dropped a cup in his nervousness. Another time his speech became stuttered, but for the most part there was a striking similarity between these two men that both failed to realize. As they spoke with one another it became more and more apparent.
 
“I don’t remember anything about the pin, myself,” said the other Walters. “But it sure does look familiar – like a little me, I’d suppose. If I had one at some point, I definitely don’t have it anymore. I probably donated it to MARS. Those bastards need something like this.”
 
“Bastards, eh?” asked Walters.
 
“Oh, sure. Every last one of them. I’m not at all into the whole shapeshifting thing. I never was, and never plan to be. In fact, I’ve gone my entire life without once being shapeshifted, though somehow I found myself in the field anyway. It’s a profitable field, just not an enjoyable one.”
 
“I completely agree,” said Walters. Carpenter had been staying out of the conversation for a good long time, and had no intentions of entering upon these two men’s private conversation. The two had spoken of just about every topic, and somehow had not disagreed once.
 
It was only after the umpteenth argument, which could not truly have been called an argument, that he realized: They were exactly the same.
 
What shocked him most of all was that it wasn’t just physically that they matched, but mentally as well. His opinions were his, his actions were his. They even made the same hand movements – sometimes at the same time – while speaking. It was as though Walters had stumbled upon his own clone. He wanted to turn around and question Carpenter on how this might be. It was impossible for someone to so finely edit their body so as to edit their mind as well. Such technology did not exist.
 
It must have been a setup. It was all a grand setup, made to make him look more ill, more insane. He knew that he wasn’t crazy – he’d been through that with Reedy. If he was truly insane, the group of thieves wouldn’t exist. They wouldn’t have been able to do the physical harm to him that they did. So, too, this could not do any harm to him, because no sane person, only an insane person, would fall for such a stunt. When he asked Carpenter, she politely responded that this was no stunt, that all of the data they had reflected this. Walters had not the time to read the files in full, only skim them. He had gotten the basic gist of what the man was like, and this man was not him.
 
In fact, it was a completely different person. Perhaps they had come to the wrong house. Then again, if they had they would not have run into a man who looked exactly like and thought that he was Greg Walters. This had to be the right person.
 
Walters was even more curious to ask about this man’s history. If he did not know of the lapel pin, perhaps his mind was skewed enough so as to contain the history of the deceased original. As Walters flung questions at the man, he could do nothing to answer them. Despite being another person entirely, he lived his own life, with his own memories. Only his actions, attitude and views mimicked that of Walters. Walters began to wonder, then, whether it was he who was mimicking him, or the other way around. They were mimicking each other, both under a strange influence that could not be defined.
 
But Walters could not remember a time when he had done any different sort of actions, had any different sorts of views. It was utterly unexplainable. No information could possibly come from this man – no cure, no history, nothing. What was the point of visiting him? He had the same DNA, yes, but unless he was the original man whose genetic information resided in the pin it was all useless. He was just a clone – a very advanced and intricate clone that should not exist but only in its prior human form. What was in front of him – if it could be called a person – was not human. It lacked its own free will, it lacked the spirit and vigor and originality that comprises every human being.
 
And yet it walked, talked, ate and acted like a normal human being. It felt emotions, reacted in similar manners to certain situations, and was everything that a human was. Walters was convinced that sometime before the lapel pin this man had been a true person, someone not himself. What was worth finding, then, was the lost information of why someone would choose to let this happen to them of their own free will.
 
“Greg,” said the original Walters, “do you ever remember being different from yourself? You know, in appearance?” The man shook his head. He remembered nothing but what he was in the present day, and what he did for a living. He was unmarried with no children. There was not a soul ho he as tied to, nobody else to go to for answers. This was yet another reason why Walters – both of them – so greatly opposed the GSS and its shapeshifting. It was actually an antisocial practice, creating people such as this, who eventually think and believe that they are who they have become. Such technology did not exist, so it must have been a very complicated and difficult mental procedure. Somehow this man had convinced himself that he was Greg Walters and stuck with it, tossing out his old memories.
 
This new Walters was almost keen onto travelling with Carpenter and Walters, but at this point Carpenter intervened. She did not want another with them. There was no room and no patience for a second Walters. She respected Walters and liked him very much, but not enough to accept two of him.
 
They continued to coerce the pseudo-Walters for information, begging that he try and remember where he kept pin-like objects in his tiny dome-shaped home, or where he would have sent it if he did keep them. There was no answer. The man hardly remembered anything of his life before being shapeshifted, assuming that this was what caused his change. Perhaps he had always looked like this and was the original person, while the original had died. The question still remained – why was his name Greg Walters? Walters was not a copy of anything. Not that he knew, at least.
 
He wanted to leave the house. He was not prepared for what he had seen and had seen enough. Despite being thoroughly shocked by this endeavor, he had learned something that he hadn’t known already about shapeshifting. He had never imagined that one would use thought to overcome their own personality, so be able to control oneself so strongly as to be able to override the very essence of their humanity. This was what shapeshifting truly did to a person. It tore them apart by their very seems, ripping the last shred of humanity out of them until all that was left was the shell which was only there for the person to manipulate as they wanted. Walters now realized that even without technology a person was entirely malleable, able to be reshaped into to whatever their heart desired. After seeing this pseudo-him, there was no discrepancy among either he or Carpenter.
 
Even Carpenter, who had at first seemed all-knowing about this tell-tale copy of a man, seemed surprised by the end. When she had first greeted the man she was not surprised. She had known his name for quite some time and was only hiding the information from Walters so as to shock him into acknowledging his fate, doomed to become someone else in his new body. Whether he wanted to convince his mind that he was another person was entirely irrelevant – the body would do it for them. Mind over matter, they had all thought – and were utterly defeated. There was nothing left but for to wait.
 
She had sat quietly, absorbing their conversation, learning new things that she hadn’t known previously. It was intriguing, what she hadn’t known. She had known about the lapel Genome because of the original Walters. She had known about the man’s ailment, and even his family, who tried to prevent the sickness but failed. He was another reason why she knew that a normal ATC transformation would not help Walters. The lapel pin Genome was causing something to happen that was so advanced, so out of touch with the technology of the day, which nothing could possibly hope to reverse it except the same technology.
 
She thought about the thieves from where this had all sprung. Walters finding it on the ground nearby an ambiguous figure, then being promptly knocked out. Their next debut was in the Hospiten, and yet Reedy still refused to acknowledge their existence. It was frustrating, because what she thought she knew and what she actually knew were two different things entirely.
 
Before they left, she asked a question that Walters had miraculously forgot to ask. “Walters,” she said, and both men turned to her. “The other one,” she said, shaking her head, “the one that lives here. You haven’t seen any odd figures running around the area, have you? Ambiguous figures who are just as mysterious as they are dangerous, and constantly rob the shops around town.”
 
The pseudo-Walters shook his head no, and it was settled. There was nothing left for this man to tell them. He had not given them that much information anyway.
 
Carpenter, however, was not upset. Walters questioned this.
 
“We’re going into MARS tomorrow to look at a few more things,” she said. “Those things will prove far more informative than this man was. You’ve only got a taste of what’s to come, I assure you. I assure myself for that, too.”
 
Walters wondered whether or not she knew what she was saying. How could she act so confident, thinking that she knew everything about what was going on? She had not experienced it before to his knowledge. Perhaps all of those days spent researching the Genome had really resulted in valuable information. This information could only be gathered at MARS, an alteration station, not a genetic station. There she could finalize her study on Walters’s strange shapeshift, and figure out the technology inside the pin and how it worked. It was far more intriguing than any clone man they could speak with.
 
They had not noticed the passing time, but it was already well past 7:30pm. They had been speaking with this man for quite a while, attempting to get answers out of his tampered mind that could, for all they had known, been falsehoods. They trusted only a portion of what the man had said, and now only trusted a portion of what any shapeshifted person said – even Walters himself doubted his speech, but this was unfounded. He eventually found reason to trust himself. If he didn’t trust himself, then there was nobody on Earth that he could trust besides Carpenter, Reedy, and his wife Jenna. These were the three people in which he knew his absolute trust was safe in.
 
He held his hand to his head as he walked along the path leading away from pseudo-Walters’s house. He had a massive headache and dizziness, and lacked the energy to continue forward much more. He had been prone to headaches more recently, but it was not due to the shapeshifting, but rather a normal occurrence that he had always had in his life. Headaches were a constant warning for him to stop doing what he was doing and take some medicine, but not lie down. He could not lie down when he had a headache – this somehow, as if a cruel joke by his own genetics, made the headache worse.
 
Feeling tired, he could not help but collapse onto the bed as soon as they returned to the hotel. His headache never worsened, but in fact was relieved quite speedily. It was miraculous – his new body must be held accountable. At least there was something else he could put trust in that manner. His new body seemed far more durable than his old one, but he would have rather not found positives to having a new body. Instead, he scorned the body for giving him a headache in the first place. He scorned it all to make it look all the worse. Carpenter was around to hear it, but never flinched at his words. Instead, she put an arm around him to calm him down, and Walters turn to look at her face. It was calming, perfect as always, yet completely unnatural. Looking at it made his headache return.
 
Late that night, a knock on the door came. The two were fast asleep, no neither noticed a small envelope passing through the crack underneath the room door.
 
That morning they showered and prepared to leave for MARS. They would be able to access it and its labs all day completely unmonitored, presumably because of Carpenter’s vast range of connections to the GSS. Walters felt lucky, but not as lucky as he felt when he stopped walking just before stepping on the small manila envelope resting at the foot of the door while dripping wet from a shower. He lifted it up, and shouted to Carpenter, “We’ve got mail!”
 
He picked it up and began to unfold its contents with his awful letter opening style that, if not controlled properly, would have torn the note in two. That went especially so for this note, which was written on scrap notebook paper and could have easily been torn. The note had only a few words upon it, but was addressed to them. Somehow, whoever had written it knew where to find them.
 
“I remembered,” it read, in hastily scrawled graphite. “Room 305.”
 
Walters called Carpenter over. This note was, without a doubt, from the man they had visited the day before. Whether it was asking to meet him in a Room 305 or it was asking them to find something in a Room 305 they were entirely unsure of, but both presumed the latter. After they found what they were looking for in this room they both decided that they would pay a second visit to the man, who now remembered information worth getting.