Sydney had been at Donoterase only a week when he began to suspect his young charge was faking it.

It was an old philosophical problem, one he and Jacob had argued about constantly near the genesis of the Pretender project: How do you know your subjects really become the person in a simulation? What is the difference between Pretending and merely having an active imagination? So a series of tests were devised for the children, designed to get hard measures of authentic emotions. Anger, jealousy, happiness, grief, affection, surprise, relief, boredom, calm, anxiety: All were elicited in simple scenarios pitting the children against one another, to make it as real as possible to their immature minds. They didn't have imaging techniques such as MRI back then, so a wide variety of physiological responses were measured, including brain wave patterns and skin galvanic responses. Then later on, when the actual simulations began, they could tell if their subjects were genuinely experiencing the same emotions while inside a Pretend.

Sydney knew the baseline scenarios were on the DSA disks Jarod stole, so it was a surprise he had never thrown it back into his old mentor's face. At the time running those experiments had felt like the most unethical thing Sydney had ever done, forcing four and five-year-olds to hate or terrify each other day after day. But then again, if the simulations really were real to Jarod, maybe it was all of a piece to him; just the first in a long string of unpleasant ordeals for his mind to ride out.

There had been one emotion that not even the Centre was willing to impress on preschoolers, though, and that was sexual attraction. Thus the infamous -- even by Centre standards -- experiment in which a barely pubertal Jarod had the equally young Miss Parker dangled in front of him in order to provoke the obvious response. The Centre's controllers also wanted hard evidence of their young genius' heterosexuality, despite the fact that it contradicted the project's goal of their Pretenders becoming "anyone they want to be." Homosexual behavior was still widely condemned as a perversion and psychological pathology then, and there was an obsessive concern that Jarod to be normal, or at least not too abnormal. Sydney had campaigned hard against the whole endeavor on the grounds that it could humiliate Jarod and actually create a sexual complex where none existed before, but he had been overruled and Jarod weathered it just fine. Miss Parker could probably take some credit for that.

In any case, Sydney could find no corresponding baseline data for James, at any point in his life. He gave the young man the day off on Sunday to help the Donoterase staff get ready for the weekly personnel shift, and poured over ten years of DSAs. Nothing. Raines must have just assumed that because Gemini shared the same genome with Jarod, his mind would work like Jarod's as well. But Sydney had mounting clues that wasn't the case at all.

From the beginning James showed a remarkable reluctance to act out a simulation. He would do it when prompted of, course. The boy was slavishly obedient, terrified of doing anything that might find fault or cause offense. But it wasn't his natural mode of doing a sim. Even at the very first assignment, with the photos of Jacob and Catherine, Jarod would have done it differently. By James' age Jarod was sliding into new characters effortlessly. He would have spent thirty seconds or more examining the photos, absorbing both the personality of the figures and all associated clues from the background, possibly asking a few specific questions to reinforce the details. Then he would look up, the new personality embedded, capable of answering questions in the first person from the perspective of the a brand new human being created wholesale in his mind.

James, on the other hand, was tentative at the beginning of every sim. At first Sydney thought he was just fearful of punishment, and given Raines' abusive parental behavior that was still a lingering possibility. But it wasn't just that; he subtly probed for affirmation before committing to a path. The boy was actively cold-reading his handlers, then tailoring his response to their response.

Sydney had to admire the level of genius necessary to survive this long undetected. James knew that certain information had to be extracted from a sim. He knew it was supposed to be done in a predetermined form -- the way a Pretender would do it. He knew he would be punished if he failed to come up with the information in a Pretender-like manner. So he had devised a myriad of strategies to get at the correct answer, and all the rest was acting.

The final simulation Sydney ran on the fifth day clinched the situation in his mind. They had been working on a variety of engineering and physics problems, all of which James performed flawlessly. Then he switched it. The scenario appeared to involve a simple decision-making process of a surgeon, trying to decide between two alternate courses of action on a patient. The real point of the sim, however, was determining how the emotions of the doctor and patient influenced the decision.

"I will perform the Whipple, of course. It is the only course of action that has any chance of prolonging the patient's life."

"That procedure has severe negative side effects, James. Switch to the perspective of the patient. What does he want from treatment?"

James cocked his head staring at Sydney, a now familiar response when he sensed he was going down the wrong track. "He -- I -- I want to be cured. But that is highly unlikely with stage four pancreatic cancer. So barring that I want to live as long as possible. But not with unbearable amounts of suffering. Then I just want the pain to end. So the decision rests on the relative weight of prolonging life versus enjoying what's left of that life."

Sydney nodded, trying not to feed him too many clues. "And the surgeon? How does he feel?"

"His priority is saving the patient's life. He is a scientist, rational. He knows this procedure is the only thing he can do that has a chance of helping the patient. But his priorities may be in conflict with the patient."

"So what happens? Do they do the procedure or not?"

"It depends on the relative strength of their personalities. The surgeon will likely win because he has the force of authority and expertise on his side. So I perform the Whipple, and try and alleviate the suffering from the side effects ..."

Sydney sighed inwardly. Hopeless. The boy could analyze every scenario six ways from Sunday, but he didn't see it from the perspective of the participants. He didn't create their minds in his mind.

He let the relieved young man off for the day, and retired to his room to think about the problem. In truth, as tempting as it was take the long years necessary to teach Gemini how to be a true Pretender, that was no longer Sydney's goal in life. Rather he had one simple task: Get himself and the boy out of this underground prison, to a position where Jarod could retrieve him. Shaping James' mind into a facsimile of Jarod's was not necessarily conducive to that goal.

Making him a better fake Pretender, though, might do just fine.

Sydney resolved then, to do the one thing he and Jacob vowed they would never do. He would lead the boy on, to make it look like his skills were rapidly advancing. The Tower would then be mighty tempted to have Gemini replace Jarod in full glory at the Centre's massive Blue Cove complex. It had been two and a half years since Jarod escaped, and neither recapture nor reindoctrination seemed a realistic possibility. They thought they had a copy, a spare of the heir locked away in the Centre's storage closet, and Sydney was going to need to convince them how very right they were.

******

Before investing a lot of time in shaping the boy for a future Sydney hoped he would never have, the psychiatrist fully probed the security limits of the underground bunker they were forced to live in. Perhaps there was a way to get Jarod a message, who which would tell him the location of the ultrasecret facility. There was also the possibility of directly escaping themselves, although the idea of being chased by Miss Parker or her less scrupulous equivalents filled Sydney with dread. He never was one for direct action, when rolling over and playing dead will do.

Sydney reasoned there must be another way out of Donoterase other than the main cargo elevator entrance, which was continuously monitored. The guards had one external viewpoint above the elevator, but it featured a blank field, utterly undistinguished to identify the building's location. Hansen left for the day via the elevator, and some judicious searching of Gemini's DSAs indicated Raines was likely accessing the facility there as well. Surely there must be some emergency exits or ventilation shafts or something.

He started pumping the four maintenance workers for information, feigning that he was concerned about the possibility of a fire. Out of the small number of people who worked there, they were the likeliest to secretly know how to get out, when push came to shove. But their answers were rather alarming. Absolutely the only man-sized way out was through the elevator shaft. There were plumbing and electrical and data line repair tunnels, of course, but all access points to the surface were welded shut. There were dozens of ventilation shafts but all were too small for a person to crawl through. One maintenance worker sardonically laughed at Sydney's concerns, stating that in the event of a fire, the only course of action was to seal off the room and pray the sprinkler system worked. Rather typical of the Centre, Sydney wryly mused, to prefer to burn down their secrets rather than let them escape.

Phone and internet lines were another possibility of getting word out, but they too were closely guarded. The only phone line was in Hansen's office. The only internet connection was activated through Hansen's command. They sent data in for backup three times a week, and were allowed personal messages at that time, but every byte leaving Donoterase was heavily screened for possible security lapses.

At last Sydney gave up that fruitless quest and focused his efforts on Gemini himself. The boy was highly adept at reading nonverbal signals, so Sydney simply began to feed him cues, louder and louder, to guide him on the more difficult sims. Like tells in a poker game: Back straight for a correct answer, shoulders slumped for moving in the wrong direction. Smiling when he placed himself in the right frame of mind, face neutral when not. A thousand subtle body movements, undoing decades of carefully formulated habits. For it wasn't just Jarod who was trained all those years in the sim lab, but his handler too, a rigorous system of response and feedback to mold a mind into something unique in the human experience.

Sydney often wondered if James consciously knew what his teacher was doing. Actually he was curious about everything that was going on in that head of his, he who looked so much like Jarod and yet obviously was not. But his true mind was hidden behind layers reticence and performance, and Sydney knew in his heart he was not the fortunate person who would get to find out.

******

A couple of months in, Sydney finally began to appreciate Jarod's ceaseless childhood complaints about being bored. Truthfully the whining had been an endless source of exasperation at the time. Didn't Sydney spent well over a hundred hours per week directly working with him, at the complete expense of any sort of family or social life? Didn't they feed him infinite libraries worth of books in his off hours, not just for future sims but to keep his mind occupied? But now Sydney began to feel the cold malaise, infecting deep into his bones. The sure knowledge that no matter what, the following day would be the same as today. There were no sick days, no weekends, no mindless errands taking one at least briefly into the sun or rain, no casual small talk with shopkeepers or neighbors. Even though Sydney had never been much for outdoor activities, at least the possibility of it existed before. He could have if he wanted to, but now he was a prisoner. Self-imposed, one he could walk out of at any weekly shift change, but that would mean leaving the child buried alive forever.

He began working on a book, one that had been rattling in his brain for many years but he never had the guts to actually start typing before. It would probably be published posthumously, at the rate things were going in his life. The book was about the Centre of course, how its culture warped everyone in it, bending them all to some demented force beyond any one person's control. He was calling it "The Cult of the Corporation."

Donoterase might get its own case study, for it was a microcosm of the tendency to form small fiefdoms of power in self-defense. Miss Parker did it, Raines did it, Mr. Parker had been doing it for a good half century, and even Sydney had done it on a smaller scale. Here, of course, Hansen had done it. He ruled the place like a benevolent dictator, both shielding everyone in it from the occasional madness at Blue Cove, and controlling its intellectual output as a means to power. Sydney was increasingly sure he was the one who had fed James the literature when he was a small boy. Hansen's control over the facility was on the upswing then, and he surely was aware that Donoterase's prominence rested on this one child's ability to Pretend. If Project Gemini delivered another failure, the whole place could be deemed a failure. And as the Triumvirate liked to maliciously point out, failure was not an option.

Sydney began letting James off with only eight hours of training a day, allowing him to roam free afterward to his preferred activity of helping the scientists with their projects. That was enough time to demonstrate progress, and look like they were working hard to anyone who casually perused the DSAs. It didn't matter to Sydney anymore; the boy's future lay in some hazy undiscovered country that did not involve simulations. His most important output was the weekly progress memo, which he crafted as a work of art, carefully building up James' purported skills without boasting or making it out to be an unrealistically miraculous change in cognition. Sydney compared him favorably to Jarod with detailed examples, going off memory since Jarod's DSAs were denied him. At the eighth report he subtly complained about the lack of facilities and resources at Donoterase, noting that the sim lab at the Centre was superior in every respect. A few weeks more, and he would outright recommend moving Gemini for full-time professional Pretending.

Then Raines decided to drop in a for a visit.

Sydney knew he was overdue in coming, but he hoped to get some warning as a professional courtesy. He should have known Raines would prefer to show off and intimidate. They were working on a difficult emotional problem involving three people and jealousy and envy, a mental minefield for James. Sydney was slowly coaxing him to think of the problem like literature, with human emotions at the core of the story instead of an overanalyzed afterthought. At the crucial point of breakthrough, Raines and his sweeper Willie rolled into the sim lab unannounced.

"Keep going. Don't mind me." Raines rasped, standing only three feet from the terrified young man.

Naturally, James began to panic. Sydney never seen it live before, but had caught and studied a few keys incidents off the DSAs in recent years. The boy's mind appeared to go into an anxiety-driven loop, one he had trouble breaking free from once it began. He nervously glanced between the two handlers, trying to decide who was more important to please, unable to speak in more than a stammer.

Sydney placed his hand on James' shoulder, giving it a reassuring squeeze. The only saving grace in this situation was that the sim was not one of Jarod's, so Raines would not have a benchmark of how it was "supposed" to go. The real test here for his student was to simply sound convincing.

"Tell me what Ms. Loraine would do again after the revelation. Take a second and focus."

James closed his eyes and huffed in a soft breath. "I feel anger, but also guilt. I think I've caused this betrayal, although it isn't logical. Because I have hurt, I feel I deserve to be hurt in response. So although I am angry, I do not lash out, but collapse from the pain I feel is self-inflicted." He didn't open his eyes during that entire recitation.

"Mindless pablum,' Raines hissed, although he had accepted such answers as exceptional when he was in charge. "Let's see him become an embittered housewife."

Sydney decided to assert some authority, what little he had, if only as a signal to the boy that he no longer had to take orders from the old ghoul. He stepped between them, dangerously close to the oxygen tank, and said, "James is my student now. You may observe, and complain about my methods to the Tower all you like, but you do not have the prerogative to interfere with my simulations."

James' eyes grew huge and horrified at the use of the forbidden name. Raines actually took a step closer to Sydney and wheezed out his outraged words. "HIS ... NAME ... IS NOT ... JAMES."

"It is now," Sydney said mildly. He crossed his arms and raised his eyebrows, seemingly nonchalant at the invasion of his personal space.

Raines, seething, finally retreated to behind the observation window. Sydney took advantage of the interruption to switch to an engineering sim, one that James could perform with confidence. He hadn't done too badly despite Raines' attempts to rattle him. If only he could get him transferred out of Donoterase, Sydney doubted he would have to pretend to Pretend for much longer.

******

Unfortunately Raines' efforts to sabotage Sydney had some effect, for it was a long four months of absentee wheedling before he saw any movement on his requests to transfer Project Gemini to the Centre. By that time the Triumvirate had gotten involved, an ominous sign. Sydney didn't have access to his normal sources of Centre rumors, but from what little he heard, the search for Jarod was going very badly indeed for both Miss Parker and Lyle. Jarod had gone underground for the past six months, to be with his family Sydney surmised, and if he was doing any charity Pretends he was no longer leaving clues about it to be discovered. As Sydney guessed, this made the Triumvirate even more eager to have a working Pretender at their disposal. Sydney took a calculated risk and sent their African overlords a direct memo outlining Gemini's qualifications, bypassing the Parkers and likely cementing his status as persona non grata once the dust settled. No matter: The Triumvirate agreed with him and ordered the boy be moved at the next shift change, the very next day.

James himself proved to be recalcitrant on the issue, however. Sydney knew it would be difficult for him, to say goodbye to everyone with so little warning. But another unexpected issue popped up. Something about the rhesus clones he was so attached to.

"Please, Dr. Sydney, let me go next week. They just found the tumor yesterday, there isn't time to set up the microarray for living tissue before the shift change, and someone's got to dissolve the para, so Dr. Randall's going to do the necropsy on blue week. Please, I have to be there for it." He was talking a mile a minute and said Doctor Sydney again, a sure sign of how distraught he was.

"Your job is not to be the pathologist, James. Tell me why this is so important to you."

"Bertha's my friend. It's the end, I owe it to her to be there at the end. To say goodbye." James looked like he was about to burst into tears, the closest to an emotional breakdown Sydney had seen yet.

To say goodbye. While they diced the poor animal up for tissue specimens. This must be the only sort of afterlife the boy knew, the scientific version where everyone donated their body and brain for the sake of knowledge, even unto the bitter end. For some reason Sydney was suddenly sure James knew he was a clone, knew and accepted it as commonplace despite the surreal nature of his short life.

"Let's go see Dr. Hansen," Sydney said slowly. There were only sixteen hours left before they had to leave, never to return.

In the end the red week vet, Dr. Letty, and several other technicians decided to stay on an extra week so James could assist with the euthanasia. They powered through the night doing the necessary prep work, and James was able to give her a final peanut before administering the sedating injection. Sydney came and retrieved him from the pathology room only a half hour before the transport was due in, and he made a mad dash around the cargo bay hugging everyone, still smelling of paraformaldehyde.