LUCY
Still propped up in the little white bed, alive for, I don’t know, an hour or two, I listen to Dr. Kim detail my Facsimilate schedule: daily doses of four sessions for the next two weeks to “facilitate your integration into—”
“Life?”
“Your Original’s life, yes.”
While he talks, I stare at the ceiling past his ear because I can’t turn my head and I’m sick of looking at his face. “Where is she?”
“Lucille?”
“No, Taylor Swift.”
He blinks at me like I’m an appliance that up and decided to talk. A muscle twitches in my jaw. I say, “Hard to think of me as a person capable of autonomous thought when you helped grow and assemble my organs, yeah?”
Dr. Thompson, standing behind Kim near the foot of the bed, breathes a satisfied laugh and says, “Your cognitive level is…”
“Unnerving,” Kim supplies, eyes back on his tablet, where he reads my vitals for the third time in an hour.
“…impressive,” Thompson finishes. “Lucille went home.”
“Why?”
I wish for a buzz, a hum, a drizzle, something. I’d take a dripping faucet. The faint soprano keen of hydrogen lights. Anything but this room’s perfect silence. So flat and stark I can hear the saliva in Thompson’s mouth when she opens it to say, “We believe separation is preferable at this stage, so the Facsimile can present its best self at the moment of introduction.”
I stare at her, try to lift my head. Fail. Close my eyes and think, Its best self, its, its, it’s…“It’s not anyone’s fault,” she says. “It just happened.”
I rub Boris’s ear, and he groans happily, head pushing into my hip. “Okay.”
I hear Mom sigh. “I only want you to understand that your dad and I still care about each other,” she says, “that it wasn’t about either of us screwing up.”
Eyes down, petting Boris, sour crimp of hurt in my chest. “Which is…better?”
A pause. “Isn’t it?”
Look up. Look up!
LOOK UP!
Isobel stands in the doorway, back straight, hands clasped. Eyes on me. How long has she been there? I open my mouth to say something, but she says, “Dr. Thompson. Phone call.”
Thompson nods and follows her out of the room.
I close my eyes again. “So, Facsimilate. Which one’s first?”
Mobilivate.
Twenty-five hours alive. Friday, and I should be at Reach the Sky. Except “I” already am. And I’m not “I.” I’m not “me.” Me. Two tiny letters, so small, yet enormous. Significant, complex. Because “me” implies self; “self” implies individual; “individual” means “single,” “one,” “original.”
Which I am not. I’m…
It’s the truth thing.
The sky is blue.
I’m Lucille Harper.
Lucy.
LH2010.2
I saw it on Kim’s tablet, the label on my files. “LH2010.2.”
Point two.
But which one’s true? Am I Lucille because I have her (my?) memories? Her (my) DNA? Her (my) skin? Because lying on the bed in my bright white cell, I can feel the sour hollow of forgetting something, of knowing I’m supposed to be somewhere else, yet I’m in this secret nowhere. Being…not nothing. Something. I’m something. But not me.
“It’s not a cell,” Adebayo says, lifting me from the bed into a wheelchair.
I can’t look at him. Not like I don’t want to, like I can’t turn my head. It just flops a bit to the left on the chair’s headrest, then rolls back to the middle. “Oh? Am I allowed to leave? Could I up and walk—” I laugh. “Oh, right.”
He pushes me down the hall. “Your body’s functionality will improve quickly.”
I don’t say anything. Not because words still feel precious, but because I’m learning there’s power in my silence. My voice is, quite literally, the only thing I control.
Adebayo pauses in the hallway, presses his hand to a near-invisible panel in the wall, and pushes me into a blinding room. I lift my hand to shield my eyes.
I lift my hand to shield my eyes!
“Lucy!” Thompson cheers from somewhere ahead of me. “That’s wonderful!” Footsteps, and her voice nears. “Did you have to focus? Or was the movement subconscious?” I’m, I’m, I’m…I’m going to throw up. The light’s so bright, so hot. Heavy, constricting. And they’re all watching. Phones up in the dark beyond the stage. Recording, waiting.
The music starts. Cass at my left, a dancer whose name I can’t remember at my right, sequins glinting. They move with the beat, starting the choreography. While I, while she…
The room dims. Screens roll down to cover the windows and cut the glare. I lower my arm, muscles twitching, arrhythmic. “Subconscious,” I answer. But I know there was a lag, from the way Thompson and Karlsson look at me.
“That’s fantastic, Lucy,” Thompson says, praising her pet for successfully performing a trick. “And after?”
I blink as my eyes adjust. “Memory. Dance recital when I—when she was six.”
Thompson’s brow rises. “Interesting.” She looks to Karlsson, who writes something on her tablet with a stylus. “Self-correction and disassociation with the Original at”—she checks her smartwatch—“twenty-five hours and thirty-nine minutes.”
I clear my throat. The pinky finger on my right hand twitches. Thompson’s attention returns to me, pausing on my hand, then lifting to my eyes, and I ask, “What are you talking about?”
“Your recognition of your status. It took OM2009—”
“Isobel.” Her voice comes from behind me. All three doctors shift their attention to its source. “My name is Isobel.”
Expression flat apart from a tightening around her eyes, Dr. Thompson says, “Of course. Do you need something, Isobel?”
Turn, turn, TURN YOUR DAMN HEAD!
But I can’t.
“You’ve received a delivery from New York. Would you like me to leave it in your office?”
“Is it marked urgent?”
“No.”
“Then, yes. Put it on my desk.”
I hear Isobel’s footsteps, followed by the sound of the door sliding closed.
Thompson lets go a long, slow breath out her nose and turns back to me. “Let’s get started.”
With Dr. Adebayo monitoring my brain activity, Thompson monitoring everything, and Karlsson on “poking and prodding” duty, I spend the next two hours wiggling my fingers, flexing my toes, rolling my ankles, practicing using my facial muscles, and lifting my arms. Once I can bring my index finger to my nose, five times in a row, using both hands, without gouging out an (infant, aftermarket) eye, Thompson has Adebayo lift me onto a table where Karlsson presses pads to my skin, then uses a machine to deliver small electric shocks through them to tone my muscle goop.
Thompson explains, “Your inability to control your body is both neural and muscular. Your nerves are growing rapidly, filling the gaps left by the RapidReplicate and assemblage processes, and your muscles have never been used. Both need directed intervention to ensure your success as a life surrogate.”
Life surrogate.
It. Facsimile. Life surrogate. Point two.
I stare at the ceiling until we’re done. Karlsson pulls the pads off one by one. Adebayo removes the sensor headset, helps me sit up, then shifts me to the chair.
“Now what?”
BodyProg.
During which Dr. Kim checks things like urine output and glucose levels and the composition of my various bodily fluids and secretions while he avoids my eye (look at me, look at me, look!) and asks things like if I’m experiencing any pain (no) or discomfort (I’m a meat robot with a glitching operating system, what do you think?), then calls for Patel to help load me onto the gurney for the body scanner.
“Remember how this goes?” he asks, voice in my earphones.
“Yes.” I close my (her) eyes. The platform retracts into the machine. The mechanisms kick on. Isobel’s orange earrings. Isobel, Is, Is, Is, Is, Is…“Is it conscious?” someone shouts. Muffled. Distant. While thump…thump…thump…
Blue.
In my eyes. My nose.
My throat. Choke, choke, choking—
The capsule’s lid lifts.
“What the fuck?!” Kim screams. Louder, closer.
Then.
“Get it out!” Thompson this time. “GET IT OUT!”
And the blue (in my ears, my lungs) moves. Chunks of it. Handfuls.
While my heart thump, thump, thump, thumpthumpthumps—
“Lucy?”
The machine stops.
Quiets.
Platform moves.
Heart pounding, breath burning, in and out, in and out (in, one, two, three, out, one, two, three, helps with the panic). Kim takes off my earphones. “Lucy. What—” He stops himself, shakes his head. Doesn’t think I can answer or doesn’t want to know.
“I woke up.”
“You weren’t sleeping.”
“Not now. Before. In the capsule, the blue goop. I woke up.”
He pales. “No. You can’t remember that. You weren’t— You remember that?”
I guess I do.
SyncroMem.
Dr. Adebayo sits back in the rolling desk chair positioned between me and a desk set up with three large computer screens. He points to the monitor nearest to me; on it is the 3-D image of a brain, my brain, with various areas alit. “This is your current brain map.” Next, he points to the central monitor. The image is far more complete than the active, semi-translucent map of mine, transmitted in real time by the sensor halo I’m wearing.
“Is that her, our, connectome?”
“Yes.” He smiles. “And we hope so.”
“Hope what?”
“That it is your connectome as well. Your cognitive level makes me very optimistic.”
I cough a laugh. “What happened to the ninety-eight percent”—Ninety-freaking-eight! He did his whole paper in verse—“success rate?”
He focuses on the third and farthest screen, scrolling with a finger down a list of data that I can’t read from here. He taps a line to highlight it. “Two percent is consequential when you’re discussing the brain.”
My nose itches. I lift a hand to scratch it and smack myself in the face. I try again. Succeed. Lights flash on my brain map as I do it.
“Ready?” he asks.
I nod. Successfully! On the first try!
Focusing back on the screens, he says, “We’ll start with word association. I’ll say a word, and you respond with the next word you think of. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Green.”
“Grass,” I say.
“Animal.”
“Bear.”
“Square.”
“Peg.”
As we volley, I watch the center and closest screens, with their synchronized pinpricks of light.
“School,” he says.
“Bus.”
“Honor.”
“Code.”
“First.” First, first…“First time, Saturday.” Cass grins. She leans back against the wall between Louise and me on the bench in the sophomore lobby.
“And?” Louise asks.
Cass rolls her head to look at Louise. I can’t see her face, but I imagine that besides the blush in her cheeks she’s arched a coy eyebrow. “And what?”
“Details! The ins and outs!” Louise laughs. Cass gives her a playful shove with her shoulder. My skin feels sour. That twinge you get in the back of your mouth when you think of lemons, but—everywhere. I wonder if my cheeks are too pale or too pink, knowing they are one or the other but not sure which. Just too.
Louise shifts on the bench, squaring her shoulders to face Cass. It makes them separate. Together yet alone. “At least, tell me if it was good.”
Still facing Louise, Cass looks at me. Not a conversation-in-a-glance like we used to share, but a check-if-you’re-listening one.
Louise notices and says, “Or wait and tell me later.” She winks, then looks around Cass to me. “Wouldn’t want to make Luce uncomfort—”
“Last,” I say.
And Adebayo pauses, looking between the screens and scribbling notes, because this time, the pinpricks in Lucille’s and my brain, indicating our answers, are different.
I meet with Dr. Thompson for EQuivalence in her office.
Sitting in a stiff white chair across from her, I weave my fingers together in my lap. I can do that now. Bend my arms, move my fingers, link them together, rest them, palms up, atop my thighs.
The lines on my hands are still too pink. Too pink, too few. You never think about how many lines there actually are on your hands. Not just fingerprints and knuckle creases and the ones when you cup your palms. But hundreds of others. Thousands of tiny lines. A lifetime of texture.
And mine are like a doll’s.
“How are you feeling?” Dr. Thompson asks.
It’s how she’s started every one of these, even though she has instant access to all of my vitals, even though she trails me from session to session.
Four and a third days of life, fourth day of existence training, and my whole body hurts. Every one of my printed, extruded, layered, assembled muscles is sore. But I can hold my head up for over an hour. Can shift myself in this chair. Can stand for twenty seconds before my knees buckle. And this morning I sat in the shower and washed my own hair for the first time in my life.
A hundred and four hours. Six thousand two hundred and forty minutes, give or take, of being this. Whatever this is. Of being me. Whoever I am. And every single one (waking and asleep) has felt like trying to remember something I’m not sure I forgot.
How am I feeling?
“Thirsty,” I say, and I see it.
The flicker. Annoyance. Suspicion. Beneath her Proud Pet Parent veneer. She grins, sharp and perfunctory, then taps the screen of her smartwatch.
“It’s the wrong name,” I say.
“Sorry?”
“Equivalence. You should call this one something else.”
Her face changes. I’ve surprised her. “Why is that?”
“Equivalent means the same. Equal.”
“And?”
“You ask how I’m feeling. What I’m thinking. Tell me”—me, self, individual—“this session is about helping me adjust to the mental and emotional aspects of being a Facsimile, of doing all that I’m required as my Original’s counterpart. But that means I’m—”
The door slides open in the wall to my left. I watch Isobel enter, holding a tray with a pitcher of water and two empty glasses. She moves to set them on the coffee table, and I say, “I’m not equal.”
Isobel stills. Only the barest pause. Fills one glass, then the second, while I continue, “I’m a substitute.”
“Yes,” Thompson says, “you are the sum of your purpose.”
I lean forward, reaching for a glass. But my hand starts to shake and I can’t, can’t, can’t-can’t-can’t-c-c-c-c-c…
Isobel touches my shoulder, urging me to sit back in the chair, then hands me the glass. Slowly, carefully, waiting until I can hold it steady in my grip.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
She nods.
Dr. Thompson watches.
Two weeks of this.
Mobilivate until I can sit, stand, walk, run. Until my body answers my asks before I know I asked them.
BodyProg until Kim’s sure my blood won’t turn acidic and I’m not going to shit out my spleen.
SyncroMem until Adebayo’s certain the Mimeo worked. “Ninety-eight percent?” I ask, and shaking his head, he smiles. “Better.”
EQuivalence until…
“Last day,” Thompson says.
I mirror her posture (legs crossed, hands clasped in my lap, head tilted to the side) and reflect her placid smile back at her. “Last day.”
“It’s an understatement to say you’ve excelled, Lucy. You have exceeded every expectation.”
Thanks? “I’m glad.”
Her focus ticks from my head to my smile to my hands to my crossed legs. Like she’s making a list. Still staring, she shifts, uncrossing then recrossing her legs and resting her elbows on the chair’s arms. It feels like winning a game of chicken.
“Do you feel prepared for your field trial?”
EQuivalence until I can look at the woman in charge of my creation, the woman who gave me life yet calls me “it,” stretch my plastic smile, and say, “Absolutely. I’m excited to finally take my place as Lucille’s Facsimile,” while hating her so deeply it’s cellular.
Thompson runs through the protocol for my release (daily check-ins via phone, at least one in-person appointment each week or immediately at the first sign of “malfunction,” the BAN chip integrated into my neck behind my right ear for remote monitoring of my vitals, the GPS chip in the same place on the left) and I let my smile relax, tighten my brow, shifting my expression from “benevolent glee” to “focused attention” while I tend to that hate, my rage, knowing that with proper care, it could sustain me. All tight and hot and roiling. My own personal nuclear reactor, cradled inside my chest.
It makes me wonder if they did their job too well. If I’m really what they intended. They, by definition, by practice, don’t want an individual. They want a product. A doll with a pulse and a preprogrammed Lucille lexicon. While I’m…
What am I?
“And after?” I ask, concentrating on keeping my tone light. “Lucille never— I don’t have a memory of you explaining what happens to me when the trial’s over.”
Thompson checks her smartwatch, too far away for me to see its display. “You will serve as our prototype,” she says, looking up again. “I’ll present you to the Board as proof of our branch’s success, then to other investors and clients as is necessary.”
“Like a floor model.”
She smiles. “Precisely. And Life Squared will keep you on hand as an example for future clients.”
“So I’ll live here. A sentient brochure. Forever.”
“For as long as you continue to serve your purpose.”
There’s no banquet. No party with a “Bon Voyage” (or better, “See You Soon!”) cake. Just dinner in my room like every night. Balanced meal, nutritious, bland, on a segmented white cafeteria tray. Alone.
Tray on my lap, I chew a bite of brown rice and eye the notebook next to me on the bed. I don’t recognize it. Yet, I do. Not like I’ve seen it before, but like I can feel her seeing it on the shelf and picking it out, the flat black cover that feels like fabric, with a geometric pattern visible only when it catches the light. I know that inside I’ll see my (her) handwriting, detailing all the things she’s done for the past few weeks that she thinks I’ll need to know in order to live her life.
Thompson gave it to me at the end of our session today, saying Lucille had dropped it by this morning. I picture her writing the final entry. Tucking it into her bag. Driving here. Waiting for Isobel to open the gate. Then passing through the doors until she’s in the lobby and we’re both occupying the same building, the same space.
It’s all in first person when I imagine it. I see her (my) hands doing the writing, gripping the steering wheel. Hear her (my) voice as she hums along with a song on the radio. Feel the surge in her (my) heart rate as she passes through the gate and both doors.
I try. But I can’t see her from the outside.
A knock.
I wait, but no one enters, so I call, “Come in.”
The door slides open. Isobel stands in the hallway, alone. She steps into my room and presses the pad on the wall to close the door behind her.
“Do they need me for something?” I ask.
Stiff shoulders, perfect posture, hands clasped lightly in front of her hips, she stops midway between the door and me on the bed. A crease appears between her perfect eyebrows, the only shift in her otherwise vacant expression. “I can’t decide if I hate you.”
“Hate me?”
She blinks, and the crease is gone, replaced by a plastic smile. “Are you finished with that?” she asks, gesturing to my tray.
No. “Sure.”
I stand to hand it to her. When she reaches for it, she grabs my hand.
Subtly.
Secretly.
And pushes something hard and plastic into my palm as she takes the tray. Her eyes flash to the hidden observation window in the wall, then back to mine. A warning.
“Thanks,” I say, and take a step back, crossing my arms to conceal whatever she put in my palm.
She nods, then turns toward the door. When she presses the pad to open it, she says, “Good luck,” but doesn’t look back.
I wait for a count of ten, then close myself in the bathroom, open my palm, and find a flash drive.