Free Infinite Ground by Martin MacInnes Page B

desiccated soft tissue remained, all edible material having been consumed.
    The inspector, finally, woke up.

IX
    The substance ingested is believed to evoke secrets contained within the individual. During the ejection, surprising meanings emerge. Detailed descriptions of ancient life are recounted. There is much laughter, partly as a technique used to relieve awkwardness felt from being around something so intimate, and partly because many of the details are absurd. Predictions are made regarding future events and, subsequent to what is revealed, the community may be lifted from its current site and moved to a safer location.
    TRIBES OF THE SOUTHERN INTERIOR, p. 119
    Wash your eyes, Inspector . Was that what she had said? He should wash his eyes?
    He had not previously realized that eyes are a common infection route. Hands on an unclean surface rubbing against them and bringing in a strain. A speaker, he imagined, might transmit an infection directly to the listening eye. Was it better, safer, living looking at the ground, maintaining distance in conversation and spending a disproportionate amount of time alone?
    He was uncomfortable with the idea that his eyes had taken on an infection. That every time he blinked he might be pasting it more firmly to his body, pushing in deeper whatever it was. His vision, which he had always thought of as an isolated thing, turning against him.
    He didn’t feel any different, wasn’t noticeably infected by anything new. But then there were the recent disturbed nights, the strange dreams. He thought back to the amount of time he had spent in the sealed office. This could be an incubation stage. He wouldn’t necessarily feel it. More likely he had misunderstood the nature of her warning, Isabella in fact talking figuratively. Telling him he wasn’t seeing things clearly. He could pick up the phone and ask her – she had been thoughtful enough and sufficiently interested in the case to offer him her home number. But he wasn’t quite sure how he would boil down his unease into a direct question. And anyway, she was working on something else now and it was late and, what was it, Friday? She would be busy, his call would not be well received. There would be plenty of opportunities to clarify the matter at a later point in time.
    She had given him an idea, though. She might not have appreciated the credit, but he was energized. What she had demonstrated was an impossibility: results from a desert office. Out of invisible microbiota decaying on a keyboard he was presented with an identity in crisis. Together, extrapolating from the data – combining the lab results with information gleaned from family, friends and colleague interviews – they were in the early stages of reconstructing Carlos. The inspector’s imagin­ation had been so affected by the environment that he saw the whole project biologically: they were attempting now to regrow Carlos. Not Carlos himself, but a replica: a clone of the missing person. The more comprehensive the replica became, the more susceptible it would be to interrogation. Discovering Carlos, discovering at least what had happened to Carlos, may come down to their ability or otherwise to establish a reasonably complex and faithful simulacrum.
    The thing with clones, especially in popular entertainment, was that they missed out the maturation process and went straight to a fully formed identity. Really you had to start earlier, the new identity had to be born, then age in the world. Strictly, then, in cloning Carlos they might have to wait twenty-nine years to find out what had happened… He was both frightened by and attracted to the idea that a clone maintained absolute fidelity to the original life. They could watch the individual from birth, a team of them, from a distance, conducting the experiment under approximately natural conditions, only the clone unaware of his origin. They would monitor him growing, record