“Does that include explaining why the three of you look so much alike?” 

Brash and bold.  He had to give Mulder that.

“What advantage would I possibly have in explaining my brothers and my partners in business to you?” 

Bud snorted and Deidre suppressed a grin.  Terrence Thorne, negotiator.

“Ladies, gentlemen, thank you for your time.  Mulder…,” Scully announced, rising to her feet.  Terry felt sorry then; she looked genuinely ashamed for their unsolicited presence.

Mulder ignored her.   “Downstairs, my partner asked Mr. White here if he had found green blood and disintegrating tissue, and he verified immediately.  As investigators who are familiar with this…anomaly…we think we not only have a keen interest in what happened, we may have a crucial part to play,” he said, and Terry realized the FBI agent was not so much trying to throw his governmental weight around as refusing to let go of a few issues of his own.   “He said we could talk with you,” Mulder went on to declare, meaning Bud once more.  “We don’t have any idea who Tom Exton is, but I can damn well bet we can give you a ‘why’ of Tom Exton…if you’ll only let us see the scene of the crime.”

Scully drew in a deep breath and folded her arms; and glanced back at Terry.  She, too, was curious to see Tom’s office, in spite of herself. 

“You said something about ex-files?”  Bud asked of Dana, leaning forward in his chair and fixing the young woman with sharp eyes.  “Not as in ‘ex-cop’ or ‘ex-agent’?  Would Tom Exton have been a former employee?”

“X files, as in investigating the unexplainable, as in evidence that does not fit the normal criteria of normal cases,” Dana replied, and a slight blush colored her face under Bud’s scrutiny.  “The X stands for unidentifiable phenomenon that would otherwise be considered circumstantial, or…” she hesitated, looking as if she needed to think about her next words carefully.

“Just plain weird,” Mulder interrupted.  He had noticed the blush and did not seem to like it much.  “You know: ghosties and goblins and things that go bump in the night,” he added.

“The paranormal?”  Deidre broke in with amazement.  “As in…UFOs?”

“That would be correct,” Dana affirmed ruefully.

“And you think Tom Exton is a paranormal anomaly?”  Terry asked. 

“Right now, I think all of you are a paranormal anomaly,” Mulder replied, returning to a more assertive posture.  “Since you employed Tom, I think I should ask if was he a copy of the three of you as well?”

“Mulder…” Scully began, clearly beginning to allow her own cool façade break down in front of them. 

For some inexplicable reason, Terry began chuckling.  He had imagined many scenarios where he explained his origins, the origins of the others, had somehow managed it with Deidre and not come up empty handed; but this had to be the most unexpected way ever to happen.  What he also realized was that Mulder and Scully had quite competently turned the conversation in their favor - so much for negotiating the terms of their sharing information.  Still, the three-way stand-off was beginning to get on his nerves and he was nowhere closer to finding out what Sid was doing.

In the corner of his eye, he saw Bud’s slight smirk.

“Cliff jumping time,” the ex-LAPD officer said.

“Indeed,” Terry replied.  “Mr. Mulder, I, for one, am actually glad you are here, especially if, as indicated, you are used to dealing with the inexplicable.  These gentlemen here are better equipped to give you more information about the murder scene, as at this point I am as much in the dark about it as you are.    To wit, you offered the benefit of your information in exchange for a participation in the investigation.  Granted.  With the consent of Mr. White and Mr. Biebe, I will not protest your presence here.  On one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“That you dissuade yourself of the notion that we deal in cloning at NanoCorp.  Nothing could be further from the truth.”  Terry met their eyes, knowing it was a weak negotiating point, but it was all he had at the moment.  He knew that employees talked, knew that NanoCorp had its own particular character of community.  It had actually served the success of the company, more than once.  But he knew he was going to have to fight any speculation of cloning activities, however suspicious, and once a government agency got a burr under its saddle (as Cort would have said), it was difficult to shake that suspicion off. 

The government could think what it liked about NanoCorp.  There were plenty of military defense contracts in their coffers to prove what they really thought.  But cloning had to be acknowledged as anathema to their operations. 

“It’s a deal,” Scully said quickly, ignoring the slightly outraged look Mulder gave her.  Turning to John, she asked, “would you be so kind as to take us there now?”

John stood up reluctantly.

“I’ll catch you up on our mission a little later, John,” Terry said, nodding for him to go.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

“Thanks for backing me up, Scully,” Mulder whispered fiercely as John went ahead of them down the hall and around the corner to inform the posted guard and unlock the office door.  They had followed him out of the main complex and across the green to the nearby gymnasium, the setting sun now casting light off the smooth glass of the office buildings and creating a haze of gold and shadows.  He knew he should be used to the dynamics of their partnership after nearly seven years: her thorough and methodical mind battling to bring his speculative nature to bear.  But he’d had an epiphany, almost a reversal, and she seemed to hover where he had been on faith.  Or maybe things hadn’t changed that much and he’d just chosen a different windmill to tilt at.  Apparently it still didn’t keep him from getting hugely irritated when Scully held to playing devil’s advocate.  The more things changed, the more they stayed the same. 

“What was I supposed to say?”  She whispered back, just as fiercely, pausing as they followed around the corner and watched John paused to speak with the standing guard and insert a key into the locked door.  They stood in a long hallway, partially darkened now as even the most dedicated employee on irregular shifts had gone home by now.  “Bud told you they were aware of no need for the Feds, John said it…I said it!  As it is, we should just take a look at this and leave those people to their business.”

“The bit about not being clones doesn’t strike you as a…bit suspect?” 

“No!  Well, maybe…they do look alike…but that’s no reason to think….”

C’mon Scully.  Don’t disappoint me…

“Aren’t they?” he asked.

“Mulder, this is a ridiculous exercise,” she chastised, blue eyes flashing.  “We came here to investigate a crime scene, not speculate on genetics…or…or…”

“Or how good the impersonators are?” From the moment he had walked into the room and saw Terry behind the desk, had seen John with his long hair and beard, he knew that any idea of eerie coincidence in appearance, cleverly dressed up, was out of the reckoning.  No, no impersonators there…and he had tried hard not to look disdainful in the face of Terry’s denial of cloning.  Whatever the reason for their existence, his instinct screamed that there was more than sibling-hood involved.  There were many ways of defining ‘brother.’

“Impersonators!  Those weren’t impersonators.  You saw how they reacted to your questions,” Scully snapped.

“Exactly.  So did you.”

“Mulder, I…”

“Even if we find what we expect to find in that room, there are still questions they will need to ask before we leave,” Mulder interrupted, deciding to change the drift of the argument.  A great part of him needed her to find something logical, some kind of proof that the threads of their discovery were not tied up with the truth.  Watching the nanobots destroy Skinner had been vastly unnerving, and the implications of its sudden re-emergence much too frightening.  He needed Scully to prove him wrong.  But so far, the leads were getting stronger and stronger. 

And that was what unsettled him the most about seeing Bud, Terry, and John. 

“Too much has happened, Scully,” he continued, his tone softening somewhat.  Listen to me.  Please.  “Too much to you, too much to me.  There’s connections here and I think we should follow them.”

“But they’re not clones, Mulder.  I think…I think I believe Terry,” Scully said.  She’d been watching Mulder’s face, seemed to understand what was moving inside him.  “They each have distinct personalities.  They all react to each other with distinct personalities. Has that ever been the case in the clones we’ve encountered so far?   Maybe they are just brothers and have formed a cooperative to run a business together.  It’s not unheard of, Mulder.”

“Its also not unheard of that these men bear a striking resemblance to someone else who is, for all intents and purposes, unique and individual.  Where have we seen that before?”

Scully sighed, knowing what Mulder referenced all too well.  “Your sister.”

“So…we go back and ask them more questions, about the murder victim, about the nanotechnology, about their origins,” Mulder emphasized.  “And from the looks of it, Tom Exton is the key.” 

How’s that for logic and proof, Scully?

John called out to them because the door was now open and he’d been waiting for several minutes.

Scully looked up at Mulder and he could see, he could tell, from having known her for so long, that she was definitely as intrigued as he, if not concerned.  “This is all to find out who created that nano-virus, right?”  She asked, grudgingly. 

Mulder nodded. 

“We asked the nice wizard,” he replied, almost relieved, “and he said ‘bring us back a broom.’  Tom Exton is our broom.”

“And I suppose you’re the Scarecrow?”  Scully asked, shaking her head.

“Sure, why not?  I’m the brains, sweetheart.”

Scully considered that for a moment, a slight pinkness in her cheeks once more.

“Then,” she concluded, with a grin, “I chose Bud for the Tin Man.”

Damn it.  Why couldn’t the look-alikes have all been copies of Quasimodo?

“This isn’t going to be like it was with the sheriff in Texas, is it?”  He asked, thoroughly disgusted.  If he were honest with himself, he really just wanted to find some way of rearranging Scully’s more-than-positive reaction to Bud.

Yep.  That bit of realization stuck in his throat like dry meat.

“Just follow the yellow brick road, Straw Man.”

&&&&

Scully had closed the door to his office with a sheepish grin; once she did, it seemed the three that were left in the room wilted like wet paper flowers.

“Oh.  My.  God.”  Deidre whispered.  Terry stood up and floundered for something to say.

“How the hell did they find out about us?”  Bud asked, standing up as well.  They had all been holding themselves in tightly, watching to see what Terry would do, what any of them would say.  “How the fucking hell did some punk in DC find out about the murder?”

“Or about you and Terry?  Who said there were clones here?”  Deidre chimed in.

“Moles have a way of…multiplying,” Terry muttered.  “I’m not at all shocked by Mulder wondering about us.  It happens every now and then, word getting out about a curious set of look-alikes.  NanoCorp is well known, an integral part of the nearby city.  We employ a lot of people.  Things are said.  Rumors get passed around.  It comes and it goes and we just do what we set out to do.  Its just that…”

“Its just that its been getting harder and harder to shrug off curiosity,” Bud finished for him.  “Hate to say it, but Cort’s arrival caused quite a stir, and we’ve been loose about a lot things.  We’ve kind of taken it for granted that our warp techs are so well screened and our medical staff is changed out regularly.  Plus, Sid is such a wicked step-queen, people are too busy watching their backs to notice how he resembles us.  Terry is so well liked, I don’t think people think that deeply about it, and me and John…well, John has the beard.  But the more we retrieve…”

“The harder its going to become to explain things,” Deidre agreed.  The two of them both ended up sitting in the two chairs sitting in front of Terry’s desk, while the former K&R specialist hovered nearby.  “But clones?  How can they look at all y’all and think that?”

Neither Bud nor Terry volunteered an answer.

“I didn’t think I’d ever say this,” Deidre went on, “but…thank goodness Cort and Rachel aren’t here!”

“Speaking of which, I think before I give my report on Tom, you need to tell me exactly what happened with those two,” Bud said.  “And Sid.  And Maximus.”

“And that,” Terry replied, falling back into his chair again, his body and demeanor considerably less rigid and controlled, “is the ultimate question of the day.  What have happened to those two?”

“I thought maybe you had Maximus tucked away in the clinic for observations but…” Bud faltered, seeing the expressions on his two friends’ faces.  “Oh, no….”

“Do you remember our little talk about a mole the first day I came here?”  Deidre asked.  “Our little jokes about Star Wars Jedis and Rachel telling us about Dimetri and how Dimetri tried to make off with Cort?  Dimetri, the one who seemed to know specific things about who Rachel was and what she was there for, and was successfully beaten back by Rachel?”

“Yeah…”

“Dimetri showed up in ‘Gladiator’,” Terry said.

“Why do I get the feeling it only gets worse?”  Bud groaned.

“Because it does.  Dimetri wasn’t after Maximus.  He was still after Cort.  Was damn near successful this time, but we had unexpected help in that arena…literally,” Terry added with a bitter laugh. 

“Dimetri works for Mikol, right?”

“Right.”

“Whoa, whoa…back up a minute here.  This whole mission was supposed to only have taken a few days.  I was told there was a malfunction somewhere, but they had fixed it.  I was actually beginning to think you guys were just stealing a vacation in Rome and you’d bribed the warp techs into covering for you.”

“I wish to God it were true.”

“So what happened?”

For long, long minutes, and with many interruptions by Bud, the two of them gave as abbreviated an explanation of the events as they could, a mishap that led to having to follow Maximus through the entirety of the movie from the very beginning - Cort’s abduction by the slavers in Zucchabar, Brianna’s mighty lunge into the games, their capture of Dimetri and his subsequent return to Mikol, despite their best efforts to hold onto him, and their inability to leave because Terry’s warp-shell was utterly useless, either for the same reasons as their beginning, or other factors to do with the warp.  They spoke of how they made it to Rome and found that Sid had been following as well – “Fucking bastard!  I knew it!”  Bud cursed; Sid forwarding ahead in the movie for his own purposes and refusing to provide them with any assurance that he would help get them all back home with Maximus intact.  Maximus was key, Maximus was Sid’s only interest.  Not even the semi-alliance with Brianna, who had also worked for Mikol and claimed to want to align her knowledge with NanoCorp, was a very promising one, and how Terry formulated a plan to try and piggy-back on Sid’s warp-shell at the moment they were all in the tunnel, according to original plan. 

“Worn out now?”  Deidre asked Bud as she and Terry paused for breath and something to drink.  “Because its not over.  To quote a gladiator, ‘not yet’.”

Bud had fallen silent, almost as if he knew what would be said next.

“Mikol had taken Dimetri out so that he could come in himself,” Terry continued, expression dark.  “And was there in the tunnel with all the rest, watching for his opportunity.  Just as Sid activated his warp-shell, so did Mikol, taking Cort with him.  Taking him…back to his hell-hole…”

“Rachel tried to grab onto him, but couldn’t,” Deidre said, voice trembling.  “Her fingers went right through him.  He was this ghastly shade of blue.”  She paused momentarily to get control of herself.  It had been well over 24 hours, but it felt like a lifetime ago.  “And it was horrible, those moments when we came crashing back into the warp room.  Rachel was devastated.  Sid had knocked Maximus unconscious, and was carrying him.  Brianna was with us and Sid grabbed a hold of her, too.  The moment those warp room doors came flying open, he was out of there and down the hall.  Terry went after him, but…” Deidre faded off, looking to Terry to finish. 

“There was a wall at the end of the corridor that just opened up, apparently at his command.  Never knew it was there, haven’t been able to find a wedge to crack it open since…not that I’ve had much of a chance to really look,” Terry concluded.  “I was set to go about that today, but then you called about Tom…and that’s when other things began clicking together.  To answer your original question, Cort is somewhere in the Czech Republic, probably being tortured, if not suffering death under Mikol’s hands, Sid has scuttled to his secret spider hole with Maximus and Brianna, so we have no idea how either one of them are health-wise, and Sid came out long enough to tell Rachel that she should really just give up, because Mikol’s warp was not as well developed as ours and that she’d probably just find Cort a gibbering mess.  Rachel left for Hromada late last night.  I should be hearing from her again soon.”

Bud vaulted out of his chair to stuff his hands into his pockets and stand in front of the glass wall looking out over the landscaped lake and park.  Helplessness and fury rendered him speechless.  He had wanted to go with them, had been anxious that he had not, although from the sound of it, there didn’t seem to have been anything different that he could have offered.  Why had he not been more attentive?  His own job had kept him preoccupied, and the warp techs were competent, perfectly self-assured that everything was going as planned.  It’d been some time since he’d done a retrieval.  Would his presence along have been of any more use?  If Terry had had problems, then things must have been very difficult.

And poor Rachel and Cort!  Bud found that his shoulders had hunched, flinching from the thought of what might be inflicted on the two of them.  They knew so little about the only rival they were aware of, a rival that apparently had technology similar to Sid’s. 

Sid.  Mikol.  It looked like they had been kept in the dark for several reasons, all of them only making sense in the twisted warped logic of Sid 6.7.  Only the nanotech had any comprehension as to why the warp existed in the first place, much less how a mad man half a world away possessed the same.  And it looked as though both of them had had the final word.

Cort.  He had come to view the younger incarnation as a friend, a kind of lost soul who’d only known desperation, sought some kind of transcendence.  Bud was familiar with that; and having also befriended Rachel, was rather pleased that the two had found each other.  Petite Rachel, a little sister; he couldn’t help but think of her that way.  If anyone could bring out the best in Cort, it was Rachel.  He felt protective of them both. 

“Bud?  This is where Tom comes in.” Terry’s quiet voice filtered through his thoughts.  “As Deidre said, we were aware of a mole, but had no clue as to where to begin to look for him.  No time, either.  I know I won’t be able to say for sure until you give me your report of the murder scene and any leads you might have, but my hunch is that we’ve found the guilty party, especially since you told me his laptop had been found transmitting data.  The only reason I had ever put that together was talking to the warp techs after things calmed down in the warp room.  There had been a security breach there and Tom disappeared right at the crucial moment.”

Bud leaned against the glass.  He felt sick. 

“Are you all right?”  Deidre had come to stand next to him, worried that he might explode.  He turned a sad look upon her and she blinked back tears.  “I’m scared for them, too.”

“I think there might be a silver lining to this, Bud,” Terry spoke again and they turned back to him.  Both must have had looks of shock on their faces, for Terry’s smile broadened into a more knowing look.  “My bet is that Sid is now so ensconced in his little hiding space that he’s not likely to come out until he’s wrenched every last bit out of Maximus.  That’s not to say we shouldn’t keep looking for him.  But I also think this is now our chance to implement what you and John and I have discussed before.”

Deidre would not understand, because no one had ever discussed it outside of himself, Terry, and John; not even Cort had yet been made privy, because his focus had been in learning to adapt to a world that had changed drastically in one hundred years.   Bud leant back against the wall of glass, nodding in agreement.  Yes.  If they were going to do any of what he and Terry and John had discussed so very long ago, fate could not have offered any better opportunity.

“You’re right,” he said as Terry nodded.  “You’re goddamn right.”

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