It felt like a furnace inside the plastic sphere, which was part of the point. A fire inside a space capsule, loss of orbit, that was the scenario James had been given for the demonstration sim. Dr. Sydney had promised it would be an easy one to exhibit his skills, and indeed it was. The solution popped into his head the instant Sydney explained the parameters of the problem, so the only thing left to figure out was how long he should dither before pretending the answer had come to him. Sydney had mentioned that "it will be fine if you have some uncertainty; consider the situation, don't jump to conclusions right away." James took that to mean the donor hadn't seen the answer right away, so he feigned some distress for minute or so until Sydney's exhortations grew to a certain level, then revealed the answer. His acting had improved under Dr. Sydney's tutelage, no doubt about it.

James still wasn't sure what the point of all that acting was, however. For as long as he could remember they had asked him to run simulations, and every time it still seemed pointless. If he didn't see the solution immediately, or at least see the colors leading him on a path towards a solution, then no amount of pretending would glean that information from thin air. In fact the whole enterprise increasingly struck him as unscientific and superstitious, a method of inquiry no more reliable or replicable than reading tea leaves, which he read about in a book once. It was strange, because Sydney clearly knew all about the scientific method, and yet he too spent all his energy training James to Pretend. It was as if he was really training for some Shakespearean-like play, one for which he had to make up the script as he went along.

As Dr. Sydney laid out the sim for him, he wondered what would happen if he simply blurted out the correct answer. What would happen if he told them he didn't need to act it out see the solution, and asked to work on the sort of problems he was actually good at? Before Sydney, with Mr. Raines, that thought never would have occurred to him. There was only obedience and avoidance of punishment with Mr. Raines, and James always did as exactly he was told. Sydney had tempered that unthinking obedience, trying to teach him that he could have actionable opinions about the world, and it was only natural he that he began to apply those skills in observation of the adults around him. But Mr. Raines was here watching him, and a few other new people whose faces were a little blurry in the distance of this huge room, and Sydney himself moved and spoke more quickly as if nervousness was expanding in pressure within him like a balloon. Now was not the time to test the boundaries of the simulations.

After he finished, everyone including Mr. Raines seemed pleased. He must have done well, because they didn't ask him to run another one. Instead they began arguing about something: He could hear a woman's voice, strident, Sydney's soft voice calming her down, a clipped manipulative voice riling her up again. He would have liked to stay and listen, watch their colors and try and interpret the situation, but the sweepers came and took him back to his barren cell instead.

He was finally here, at this mysterious Centre people sometimes whispered about, and then cut off if they thought he was listening. Sydney had warned him that he was leaving Donoterase, and had heavily implied he was going somewhere better, that the new living situation would be a vast improvement over the lonely antiseptic halls of the old. So far his initial impression of the Centre was that it was dreary and horrible. The walls themselves seemed to have a blackness to them, and he couldn't tell whether it was the colors assaulting his brain from his gloomy mood or the real physical features of the place.

The ride over should have been a clue, but he was too excited to note the signs. James had been exhausted from staying up all night working on Bertha's necropsy, but Mac had slipped him a paper cup of thick coffee so that energized him for the morning. Both the red and blue shifts were there at the turnover, some coming and some going, so he bade goodbye to the ingoing blue week first. There were some new sweepers too, apparently to ensure he didn't try to escape during the transition. It was ridiculous; where would he go? During the ride the red week crew came up to him one by one, despite the glaring of the sweepers, and wished him luck. Some people even expressed condolences for Bertha, although he didn't know why, or how to respond. She was sick a with a terminal disease that would cause increasing pain and discomfort, so it was time for euthanasia. He would miss her, but he would miss all the other animals and people too, and they weren't dead yet.

The elevator and traveling vehicles made him feel nauseous, as if the world itself were shaking. That may have just been nervousness. He had never been inside anything that moved before. James hoped he could see sunlight, or clouds, or the moon, any of the things outside that he always had to imagine, but the trucks were sealed tight with only a dim brownish light. Everyone's colors all looked strange in the weird light, muted, but in retrospect that may have been due to mental state of everyone in the truck. They were all going home, but they knew James was going ... elsewhere.

When the truck door opened a waft of fresh brisk air blew in, an unfamiliar fishy smell tinging his nostrils. On some ancient instinct he knew that it was the sea. Outside the truck he hoped to see the long-imagined shoreline, but all that was visible was an open cargo bay door. Through the door he could see a blur of green that could be forest, and an enticing light, swirls of orange and pink and yellow yet still the brightest light he had ever laid eyes on. Sunrise. Without thinking about it James took a step towards the opening, just to get a better look at the lovely colors, but two of his guards stepping in front of him to menacingly prevent him from inching any closer.

The red shift crew all silently filed to some unseen back door without another glance at him, and Sydney gently touched his arm to direct his attention. Mr. Raines was wheeling up with yet more sweepers.

"Gemini. Come with me." For an instant James was terrified he was back in Mr. Raines domain, but Sydney followed them too. The exact chain of authority was unclear; he needed to pay attention and obey.

The head sweeper led them through an incomprehensibly big building, twisting corridors and an another stomach-churning long elevator. Sydney trailed with Mr. Raines, arguing for the two of them to have the day off. James listened intently, trying to extract everything he could from the conversation.

"I haven't been allowed home in six months. And the boy was up all night assisting with one last experiment for Hansen. Surely the demonstration sim can wait a day while we all have time to adjust to our new surroundings," Sydney was saying.

"No," Mr. Raines wheezed in response. "Due to the events at Pakor, the time table for this project has been moved up. The Triumvirate no longer believes Gemini is secure."

Pakor? Pakor was the back-up storage facility for tissue samples, and one of the in vitro labs external to Donoterase. James couldn't imagine what could have gone on there that had anything to do with his security.

"When is the final move scheduled?"

"The day after tomorrow. We expect your full cooperation, Sydney. Mutumbo is pleased with your progress. You can continue working with him in Africa. Parker wants a live demonstration this afternoon."

Africa? Apparently he wasn't going to be at the Centre long. James' sense of geography was hazy, but even he knew the continent of Africa was a long distance from the North American east coast. At least Dr. Sydney was coming too, and maybe not Mr. Raines. That had to be good news.

Then they locked him in his room for the morning, and the lonely horror of his situation began to dawn on him. There was no one here to meet, no materials to read, no data to be analyzed, nothing to do but stare at the blank walls and the blinking red lights of the cameras.

James was no stranger to isolation. When he was younger and Mr. Raines exerted more direct control over his daily life, they often left him alone with only books to keep him company. He had tutors when he was a baby, but by the time he was seven he was expected to teach himself all relevant information for the sims. Over the years Hansen let him out more and more when his handlers weren't there. At first it was under the guise of needing assistance with this project or that, but soon it became an entire parallel life, one when Mr. Raines was present and one when he was not. He didn't have a family, but at least there were people to talk to, and problems to solve that kept his mind busy and bolster his confidence after many anxious failures at simulations. James wasn't under any illusions that anyone who worked at Donoterase loved him, but he could secretly care for them in his heart, a little bit.

After the brief demonstration the sweepers led him back to the same cell without so much as a boring journal article to keep him occupied. There James' mind began to spin around his predicament, sucking faster and faster in a downward into an emotional vortex. Being at the Centre was like being six years old again, when he was under the constant surveillance of tutors and sweepers and the malevolent figure whose colors oozed black, for bodily illness and for corruption. It wasn't what he expected. Somehow he had gotten it into his head that there would be other Pretenders at the Centre, the older ones maybe that had already been trained. He thought he was about to join an adult community, but it was looking like he was the only one. Perhaps the donor had been a singularity, the Centre's pet freak of nature, and now that he was gone they needed a replacement. Which meant he was going to have to keep up this dismal charade for the rest of his life, trying to be a copy of someone he had never met and knew nothing about. Except of course that his mind was like a chameleon, and James' was not.

James could feel his walls falling, and hated himself for what would inevitably happen next. Hated the weakness, the loss of control. He had the presence of mind to glance around and identify a spot next to a table where he would be mostly hidden from the cameras. At least the proof of his shattering incompetence wouldn't be recorded for posterity, or for Mr. Raines to torture him with later. He sat on the floor and put his head on his aching knees, and the tears began to fall. Over his defective mind and body, over the loneliness which would never be ameliorated by friends or loved ones, over his listless gray future doing something he was beginning to detest to the very depths of his soul.

It was in this frame of mind that the beautiful lady walked into the room.

James heard someone come in and his heart seized in terror, for there was no way to hide the fact that he had been crying. No one shouted at him right off, so he took a couple of seconds to pull himself together while the visitor looked around for him.

"I'm over here," James said as he stood up. "Do you want me to do something for you?" But then his voice trailed off as he really focused on her. The woman's colors jumped out at him, a huge fire of red with sharp ridges of blue. The chroma were influenced by her necklace and eyes, but it was more than that; her personality could leap out and strangle a person from across the room. Then he looked more closely at her face, and realized he recognized it. It was the same face Sydney had showed him in the photograph all the way back in week 20. Only like Sydney's twin, it was not the same person at all, but her daughter.

James was so distracted absorbing all of this that he almost failed to notice the beautiful lady was staring back at him, with the same shock of recognition he saw from Dr. Sydney and Mr. Raines. "No," she said finally. "I just want to talk to you." She motioned for him to sit next to her on the cot.

"You knew ..." he almost blurted out the donor but remembered himself at the last second. "... Dr. Sydney?"

She laughed, and it didn't sound at all like he would have guessed. Her voice was lower, richer than her tiny frame would suggest. "Yes, I definitely know Syd. Grew up around him, in fact. He's been teaching you?"

"For the past 25 weeks." That reminded him of simulations, and he realized that must be what she was here for. "Do you need me to work on a sim?" Even to himself, the words sounded hesitant.

Her mouth cricked up again in amusement. "You sound thrilled at the prospect. Do you like running simulations?"

No one had ever asked him that before. Not a single person. "I'm supposed to," he said softly. "But I'd rather do ... do ..." At that moment he couldn't articulate what other possibilities existed. The words anything else formed in his head, but it seemed so selfish put baldly like that. The simulations were supposed to help people, shouldn't that be his goal?

"Do you want to do what the other kids do?"

"What do other kids do?" He had so little frame of reference, other than the abstract knowledge that educational institutions existed. Huckleberry Finn floating down the river? Jem, Dill and Scout running the in the woods all summer, with an ungraspable lack of supervision? Those stories were from a more primitive age. James hardly knew what summer was.

"Play. Laugh. Make friends. Talk. Maybe meet a girl if you're having a good day. Live your life." James didn't know what to say. It was about as realistic as traveling to the moon. The beautiful lady wrapped her arms around his shoulders, bringing him in for an embrace. A wave of relaxation flowed over him, and he resisted the urge to nestle his head on her shoulder like a small child. "You know, when I was your age, I knew someone like you. Exactly like you. He complained about how boring the sims were, and we had this same conversation."

"What did you tell him?" Her colors floated in front of the two of them as she spoke of the donor, swirls of anger and regret and frustration bobbing in the sea of gorgeous red.

"That he would need to leave the Centre if he wanted to really live."

"Did he?" James whispered. She glanced at him sharply, her chroma illusions shifting yet again. They both knew what the exchange was really about.

"Eventually. Maybe we can do better with you." She stood up, intending to leave. "Syd says you call yourself James? Come with me then, James."

"Gemini isn't going anywhere with you." Mr. Raines stood at the doorway with his favorite sweeper and -- devastatingly -- Sydney right next to him. "He belongs to the Triumvirate, and we will deliver their Pretender in one piece, without your interference."

The moment of promise was shattered. The beautiful lady was lower in the hierarchy than Mr. Raines, and escape was just a fantasy of hers. Someone else already owned him, and there would be no life beyond the simulations. There was no point in hoping that tomorrow would bring anything fundamentally different from yesterday. His psyche was sliding to the gray, towards no colors and no personality, acquiescing to Mr. Raines at last. Gemini did his best to forget the enticing words as soon as she left the room, leaving him alone again.

******

Very early the next morning, year 8 blue week 45 day 2, sweepers woke up Gemini and hustled him to get dressed to leave. They were transporting him a day earlier than he expected, but he no longer questioned any of their demands, even in the privacy of his mind. Dr. Sydney was going with him at least, a tiny consolation. They raced down the maze of hallways again back to a similar loading dock as the previous morning, only a group of long black cars awaited them this time.

The brown-tinted windows obscured the rising sun again, but this time there was still enough light for him to glimpse a distorted view of the outside as the vehicles began to move. Neither the moon nor clouds were visible, but he could make out trees and buildings and at one point the he thought caught an image of the beach. Even the rocks were interesting, their textures unique to his experience, their colors lifelessly soothing. The caravan was passing by a particularly fascinating rock cut through a hillside when the cars unexpectedly rolled to a stop. Some sort of accident ahead. Despite his melancholy mood he craned his head to get a look. Dr. Sydney sat serene next to him.

Without warning car doors opened, smoke was everywhere, shots fired. He saw three assailants: a younger brown-haired one gassing the lead cars surrounded by a maelstrom of colors, every color in the never-glimpsed rainbow; a distracting flank maintained by a skinny red-haired woman with flaming orange colors wearing a gas mask; and a older man that was obviously their father. As the silver-haired man reached their car, Sydney leaned over and whispered in his ear, "Go with Jarod."

It was the first time he'd ever heard the name.

The man tossed the tear gas into the car as Sydney practically shoved James over his lap out the door. There his vision seemed to explode in the brightness, his first exposure to the overwhelming luminosity of full sunlight. The man yanked him blindly towards another vehicle when he heard yet another car screeching to a stop near the caravan. James' eyes began to adjust, not sufficient to make out blurry faces in the distance, but enough that everyone's colors were visible again, brighter than he ever imagined possible. He saw the unmistakable shimmering ruby of the beautiful lady get out of the new car. Her attention was divided between the younger man and James himself -- not himself, he realized, the older man next to him. She hated him, for some reason, and both loved and hated his son.

James could see some of the red flipping to black as she tried to make up her mind. She gazed at him with a weariness, as if her entire life had pushed her to this phantom tipping point. In that instant, he saw her decide to let him go, and take back the donor in his stead. He wanted to tell her no, don't do it, that he was fine with living in the gray if it meant his twin and progenitor got to live his life with that rainbow. But she raised her gun and shot anyway.

The bullet penetrated the right upper thigh, and although James's sight was still wonky he could tell it wasn't a flesh wound. The donor's femur shattered and gave way underneath him, and as he went down James saw the rainbow crumple down to black, like a star collapsing in on itself. His grandfather shouted and wrenched them both into a nearby truck. I was wrong, James thought absurdly. Tomorrow really might be different than yesterday. Then his mind too sent him back to the comforting oblivion of night.