LUCY
Lucille sets my painting on the counter carefully, wipes the tears from her cheeks with a hand, and crosses the room to sit on the love seat. I watch her. Feeling my heart rate slow, my tension ease, then join her. My phone buzzes in my back pocket. I check the screen.
“It’s Life Squared,” I say.
“About what?”
“Elevated heart rate.” I type out a quick text, telling them someone slammed a door and scared the shit out of half my class. Seconds later, I receive a reply: Please advise, new in-person progress appointment scheduled for 6 p.m. today. “They want me to come in later.”
“Why?”
I shrug and breathe a deep sigh. The quiet between us goes slack.
“I figured you’d be an extension of me,” Lucille says. “All the parts I needed and none of the ones I don’t. Or, I hoped you wouldn’t get those. I don’t know. They kept saying ‘copy,’ ‘duplicate’…”
“Facsimile.”
“Right. And I thought that meant…exact. An exact reproduction of me. Who I thought I was, at least.” She pulls her feet up onto the couch and hugs her knees to her chest.
“Is that why you were okay with giving me back?”
Her eyes brim again. “How’s that for a healthy sense of self-worth, huh?”
“Something preaching something something choir.”
Lucille breathes a sad laugh, then shakes her head. “I’m so sorry. But, if I’m honest, I’m not sure what for. I don’t regret doing what I did. You’re here because of it.”
“You don’t?”
She turns her head to look at me, and I know our expressions are a perfect mirror for each other, just without the images being reversed. The same, but different. “No,” she says.
We close the gap between us at the same time, looping identical arms around identical backs, breathing with identical lungs, identical blood pumping through identical hearts. Loving each other and trying harder to love ourselves.
When we let go, we sit shoulder to shoulder, sunk low together on the worn-out cushions. I ask her about Marco, and she tells me about the party, breaking up. “I slept with him,” she says. “The last night of our trip.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” She picks Boris hairs off her pants. “I think…I thought he was the answer. Which seems pretty ridiculous now. I mean, I really like him. He’s funny and kind and decent. I don’t necessarily wish I hadn’t done it. I guess I wish I’d done it all differently. I dove headfirst into it, into him, because being liked by him, wanted by him, by anyone, felt like the solution. Like if he wanted me, then I was finally doing everything right. Like I finally deserved to be wanted by someone.
“I know that’s why I answered Thompson. As pathetic as it sounds, it’s because she, Life Squared, wanted me. Because she said she needed me. That I was their ideal candidate. The best.”
I grab her hand, stop her picking at her pants. It’s both weird and not weird, touching her. Weird because my brain says mine, but not weird because it’s like touching anyone. Just warmth, just skin. I turn her hand over to look at her palm, holding it flat beside mine. “I don’t know,” I say. “I think we’re kicking this trial’s ass.”
She laughs, then stares at our hands like I am. “You know enough about me—”
“Understatement.”
“Tell me about you.”
Twenty-six days of consciousness. Fourteen at Life2. Twelve here. But there’s a lot. I tell her about Facsimilate and how her memories shift and recolor until they feel like mine. I tell her about how it feels to spend time with Mom and Dad. “I can feel their love, but it’s for you. Not me,” I say, and her brow curves before she rests her head on my shoulder. I tell her about school, about art: “I think I love it so much because I know you’ve never felt it. Which sounds kind of shitty, I guess. But everything about me is either copied or repurposed, while this is entirely and purely mine.” Then, about Bode: “I don’t know why he likes me. I like being liked. He’s fun and interesting and creative. But there’s that extra thing where he thinks I’m you.”
She listens to all of it. Letting me talk, meandering along the tangents of my thoughts, without interrupting. Just being here with me. Proving that neither of us is alone.
Finally, I talk about me: “You talk about feeling partial. Or, I know how you worry about being inadequate. I can feel it in a way that’s more than empathy. Like I can pull the feeling on and wear it around for a while. But I also know that I don’t feel that way. After all of it, how and why I exist, Life2’s incessant attention to semantics. ‘It.’ ‘Life surrogate.’
“I know I’m not a thing, Lucille. I know I’m a person. A whole person. Not you, just me, but—”
I take a deep, centering breath, and stand up. “I need to show you something.”
LUCILLE
Closed in my bedroom, I sit in my desk chair, laptop open. Lucy leans over to plug in a flash drive. “From Isobel,” she says, then stands back to watch me watch them. Video after video. Dr. Mitchell, BF1901, AA1903, GT1904, and the rest.
I feel sick.
I mean, I knew. Not details, but I—we—knew, right? That they’d have had to do tests. That Isobel wasn’t their first attempt. But that’s not what turns my stomach. It is, but it isn’t. What makes me cover my mouth in shock is the heartbreaking callousness of it. With my own Facsimile at my back, I want to scream at every single one of them, Don’t you care? About Olivia? About Isobel? About Lucy? About yourselves?
I feel painfully, impossibly naïve. I can’t even blame just Thompson or Life2, because while they were using me, I was using them, too. For validation. To loosen the knot in my chest. To feel complete. I share that guilt. I didn’t think of my Facsimile, of Lucy, as a person. Not one with thoughts and feelings. She was temporary. An extension of me. A thing. And irreparably wrapped up with my own sense of deficiency. She was partial, but supposedly the perfectly shaped piece to fill in my own gaps.
I look up at her. “How do we— What do we do with this?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why’d Isobel give it to you?”
Lucy lifts a shoulder. “So I’d know? She said she was trying to help me. Help me help myself.”
I look back at the computer, the video of Isobel’s presentation paused near the end. “It’s proof. Gigabytes of it.”
“The NDA.”
“Void. Since I used the fake ID. But that means Life Squared can sue Mom and Dad. I looked it up yesterday.” I meet her eye. “You think they’d do that?”
“I think Thompson used it as a way to make you feel important. In on it. And to scare you into keeping your mouth shut.”
“So, then what? The contract’s void too, but it’s not like they’re going to give a shit about that. Say Whoops! Guess we’ll let Lucy go!” I push the heels of my hands into my eyes, and try to picture it. The fallout of what we’re both refusing to say outright. I drop my hands into my lap and look at her, eyes slowly refocusing. The pink suits her. “We both know the issue isn’t the paperwork.”
Lucy purses her lips. “So we publish it. Go public.”
“You’d do that?”
She gives me a helpless look. “Do we have a choice?”
That’s when we hear it. We’d been so focused we must’ve missed the garage, the door to the kitchen, Boris’s whines. Now there are footsteps on the stairs, and, “Lucille? Are you home? I got a text from the school…”
The bedroom door opens.
Together, we turn. “Mom?”
She sees us. Both of us. For one wide-eyed second. Then faints dead away on the floor.