"S-Sophia?" Adam couldn't believe his eyes nor his memory.
The woman took a step back, shy and scared.
"Um... I'm not Sophia," her doe lips trembled. Her personality surely concluded that she wasn't the person whom the ex-detective had been acquainted with. However, her appearance couldn't fool him. "I... I was worried that you were, um, sleeping for too long. I'm happy to see that... you're... awake, sir."
Adam initialized his memories. With a head full of questions and unlimited answers, he had to tread lightly.
He approached the alive and breathing carbon-copy lookalike of the woman he had shed blood of. Who could this be? If not Sophia?
"Well, thanks for the hospitality," he raised his hands to show signs of surrendered, peaceful intentions. "I'm Adam, nice to meet you."
The woman was dressed in a pearl-white turtleneck sweater, bottomed and gift-wrapped by navy blue overalls. Her blonde hair was neatly organized in a pixie bun, with strands of her sideburns gracefully hanging from the tops of her temples. With her plush doe lips and inhumanly beautiful blues of her eyes, naturally lined by a royalty of eyelashes, she was a dreamgirl for every man who desired an innocent butterfly for a life partner. Someone to protect every day and cherish in every way.
"Um... Pleasure to meet you too... Mr... Adam," she replied, inconfident. "My name's Evelyn. You can call me Eve. I think... I think I know something that I shouldn't."
Adam's suspicions yelled "one" in Spanish to his table of a card game of a mental gallery of hints.
She was not Sophia, the woman he had murdered. Based on her reactions from encountering him, she was also unlike the other people he had been talking to. For starters, she wasn't aware of his identity. Whether she was truly the niece of a man named Michael, and the co-founder of a café, was about to be investigated.
"Hmm, I see. What's the knowledge that's troubling you, miss Eve?"
"Er... Something that would take some time to explain... But... You look like... Like..."
"Jack Jucas?"
"Mhmm," Evelyn nodded, closing the purse of her lips as if she was slightly flabbergasted by Adam's mind-reading response. "Are you... Jack?"
"No, I'm Adam. Adam Jucas."
"Nice to meet you, sir. I'm Evelyn. You can call me Eve."
The repetition triggered a different response in Adam's mind. 'Well, that was unexpected. Didn't she just introduce herself a while ago?'
Then it hit him.
Eve might have an affliction of anterograde amnesia.
"Hmm, okay Eve, is this your cabin?"
"Mhmm."
"I have some questions, if you'll please cooperate with me," Adam gestured a welcoming butler's hand towards the room. "It's a dangerous town, this Vicilia place."
An aroma of uncertainty clung to her like perfume. Adam's eyes were transfixed on hers. Hers on his. Finding a common ground of involuntary consent, Adam invited her inside.
A shuffling noise startled Adam.
Turning around, he found Eve hastily scribbling down notes into her journal.
***
"January 22," Adam flicked through the previous pages of Eve's journal. The owner of the notebook was dreamily undergoing rapid-eye movement, tucked in a comfortable bedroll on the floor like a sleepy kitten. He didn't want to breach her privacy, but it had to be done. He read. "I feel scared. I feel trapped. Oh dear God, please help me. If only someone else had escaped from the domestic dimension like me, maybe I could still have hope. I cannot do this anymore. Mentally drained as I am, I wonder for how long I can survive."
'Sombre words,' Adam commented to himself. 'With no way to verify the authenticity. But it'll do, I guess.'
He tenderly flipped the beige-skinned pages back to the default position marked by the current date.
The selene solemnly smeared the world of wood outside in monochrome honey. Outside the urban areas marked by the café, no flora nor fauna sang spontaneously.
Thanks to Eve Bouchie's past experiences and her sentiments, Adam could recline on some solid hypotheses for explaining everything so far.
The weight of all the information would've overencumbered anyone not accustomed to handling mass fleets of facts.
The town of Vicilia wasn't an element within the Venn diagram of maps produced in the foreign lands far away. In fact, it wasn't a real location; the most relevant definition would be a staged laboratory for experiments. Human experiments. Cloning.
Indefinite numbers of men and women subjects had been generated in a place beyond the limits of Vicilia, and the limits of Eve's knowledge. For a number of years, the world had remained an infinitely recurring cycle revolving around the life of a visiting detective on vacation. Certain people were already aware of all the basic facts about the detective, drilled into their brains from the moment they were born. But none were allowed to venture any deeper or further.
Certain people already had a fixed biography, with a profile pertaining to their roles.
Michael Bouchie owned all of the businesses in Vicilia, with the gas canister factory, the Leafy Lodgings apartment, and the gas station being inclusive examples.
His niece, or more suitably his "nieces", jointly owned and worked at Café Eve-Jack. They all were clones based off an original female anonymous host.
Engaged to his niece was Jack Jucas. For reasons unknown, the number of male clones - based off an ancestral and unnamed male host similar to the Bouchie women - were proportionately fewer. Much more scarce than the female clones. Adam Jucas, was bound by the strings of fate to be the only other male clone alive.
Other people existed too, but with an importance far too sparse to have their own lifestyles. They were often seen hanging around the café as "filler material".
All the people knew only what the authorities behind the enclosed economy wanted them to know.
Depending on a variable ratio of delays, the entire town of Vicilia underwent a pandemic of amnesia - each person forgetting what they had done in the past... unless they had regained a fragment of their consciousness.
Eve Jucas was the first clone to randomly realize about the frugal fake world they lived in. Due to a mutation in her genes.
Adam Jucas was the second clone to reach that level of sentience.
Jack Jucas had previously gone missing ever since Michael lost his wife due to a roadrage incident. Eve had lost count of the number of years, but it wasn't more distant than three solar revolutions into the past.
Evelyn had known the stakes of being discovered. Of the wrath of the faceless authorities if any test subjects were suspicious of having too much knowledge for their sake. As for the hoard of her own, she had managed to learn a lot simply from natural observation. Spending days and months working at the café, substituting the schedule for Michael's wife. But she knew she couldn't live near the bustling buildings with a relaxed spine.
Some of the ideas were mainly theories for explaining the social physics of Vicilia.
Yet, Adam noted all of them as being the most accurate formulae for representing the insanity he had just awoken into.
He knelt down to caress the soft smooth cheek of the sleeping survivor.
Sadly, Eve developed a disease that limited her ability to retain memories of the present for too long. Thankfully, she trafficked logs from a lumberjack's mill till she had a roof over her head and a place for refuge, out in the bowels of untamed forests. She built her own furniture, and manufactured her own paper.
Out of desperation, she had become the only lonely wise woman. But an independent woman.
The hurricane of controversial information passed its eye over Adam's cranial cage of consciousness, soothing his nervous system via the aid of endocrine hormones.
Adam was grateful to God for showing him the way, if not the way out.
He was now convinced about everything he had seen and heard. 'Looks like they're gonna miss their favorite detective when they arrive for the maintenance. Who knows when that'll happen, but I must hurry.'
Sophia's murderer seated himself back onto the bed, donating a glance back at Sophia's sister.
'We must hurry.'