FaceMate

by Steven M. Greenberg

  And there it was.

  There they were.

  Ben came up first, at Alex’s direction. Screen left, the picture that Eddie had brought him scanned in yesterday. Screen right….

  Alex squinted at the image, thinking: Young. Pretty face. Wearing uniform. Why wearing uniform? Car in background. Mechanic—yes. What kind of car?—No. Irrelevant. Ignore. Focus on picture. Compare. Left. Right. Close. Very close. Compare mouth, left, right—same. Compare brow. Compare eyes—blue, very blue. Very same. Chin dimple, left, right, same. Smile—both smile. Teeth same, smile same. Left-right nose same, hair same. Very close. Very very close. Like twins. Like other twins found many states apart, many countries apart, across oceans even. Twins glad. Parents glad sometimes. Different this time though—this time perfect twins across not states or continents but decades. Identical match across decades. Eddie will be amazed to see. Ben will be amazed to see. Ben is very nice, very good. Ben will be happy to see. Goodgoodgoodgoodgood!

  Alex sat back in his chair. He was glad. He wasn’t entirely sure why he was glad, but glad he was, whatever. There were some twitches at the corners of his mouth, strange twitches, so strange that he felt uncomfortable with their strangeness and cut them off, suppressing an inchoate smile.

  Then he thought of Rajiv. He thought that Rajiv would be just as glad as he was. Rajiv would be glad that the new computer hardware was working so well, that the brand new program was working so well, that the file base was big enough now to give them matches so close that the pictures looked like twins. Even across decades, they looked like twins. Rajiv ought to see this right away, thought Alex—and so he buzzed.

  Bzzz, went the signaling device on the wall just beside the doorway, whereupon Rajiv turned to the person who was sitting in a chair slightly off to his right, but angled toward his, as his chair had been angled toward hers for the past five minutes of their conversation, and said:

  “Umm, sorry—That’s Alex. I’ve got to check my inbox for a sec. Just sit tight for a little bit—OK?—and we’ll talk some more as soon as I see what the big guy needs.”

  Andi Mackey stayed put as asked while Rajiv clicked his screen, tapped the keyboard, and saw the following text appear:

  ALEX: U COM HRE NOW

  To which Rajiv nodded in compliance and typed back in due obedience:

  RAJIV: OK, but right in the middle of something—10 minutes—OK?

  ALEX: NOW

  RAJIV: Can’t right now, sorry. Important—10 mins & I’ll come.

  ALEX: CNT WAIT 10—5 MAX—OK?

  RAJIV: OK 5. There in 5—OK?

  ALEX: OK GDBYE

  “Sorry, Andi, five minutes and I’ve got to go. But while we’ve got the five minutes, can you give me a little more info about her?”

  “Sure, but … like what?—like what exactly do you want to know?”

  “She’s—she never goes out, you said, right?”

  “Well maybe to the doctor when she’s got to, but that’s about it.”

  “What kind of doctor does she go to?”

  “You know what kind.”

  “Uh-huh, I guess that probably answers the question well enough—So, anyway, what does she do at home? Anything else besides the computer?”

  “No, it’s like the computer is her only friend.”

  “And she’s been like that since—when?”

  “Since always. Since she was a baby just about.”

  “And talking? She doesn’t like to talk too much?”

  “How about never. When she wants to tell us something, she types it on the screen.”

  “Amazing—That’s amazing!—And how about touching? Does she hate it when you touch her?”

  “I guess so. I mean, I’ve never really tried.”

  “Geez-oh-man! That’s—what you’re telling me is incredible. It, like, blows me away! I know somebody just like that—I mean, just! And you said she’s, like, super-smart? Like off the charts on tests and stuff?”

  “Yeah, Mr. Patel, like scary smart. Linda’s brilliant.”

  “Does she…. Has she ever gone out, say on a date, for instance? Do you think she’d like to meet a guy?”

  “Linda?—Oh, lord no, I wouldn’t even bring it up. She and I—we’ve never even talked about her getting together with anyone. I really don’t think she ever will.”

  “OK, but she’s only—how old did you say she was?”

  “Oh, she just turned twenty. We wanted to have a little party for her at home, but she wouldn’t come out of her room.”

  “And what does she look like? Does she look like you?”

  “Well she is my sister, and I guess there’s a kind of resemblance, but, well, Linda is a little bigger than me.”

  “Like bigger how? Heavy, you mean? Chubby?”

  “No, not that big, just not as skinny as I am. I’ll bring in a picture if you want, but … I don’t quite get why you want to know so much about her. Are you looking for another programmer or something? I’m sure she could do it great if we could coax her out of her room, but, I really doubt….”

  “Bring in the picture,” Rajiv interrupted, “and if you get a chance to talk to her tonight, ask her if she might like to meet someone who’s got a million things in common with her—Will you do that for me?”

  “Sure I will, Mr. Patel. So what you’re telling me—is it true?”

  “Is what true, Andi? That I want to introduce her to someone?”

  “That there’s somebody else like her. That’s what I meant to ask. Linda’s so different, it’s hard to believe that there’s another person out there in the whole wide world who’s even remotely similar. So you’re saying that there is?”

  “I guarantee you that there is. Bring the picture in tomorrow and we’ll talk some more.”

  ALEX: U READY?

  Something really major was up. Rajiv knew it the instant he set foot in Alex’s hermetically sealed fortress-of-a-room and found, to his amazement, not merely Alex on his chair facing away, but Alex with another chair beside his chair facing the same way away. The extra chair next to Alex in front of the computer was for him, Rajiv. Alex tapped the top of it just as the door lock clicked shut, and made a summoning wave of the hand requesting him to sit. And so, his curiosity aroused to rapt anticipation, Rajiv Patel stepped to the chair next to Alex’s, and sat.

  ALEX: U WONT B-LEV. READY?

  “Sure. What’ve you got?”

  Rajiv stared at the screen entranced.

  LOOK! said the monitor in Alex’s printed voice.

  Alex clicked the mouse, once, twice—and two pictures appeared. The one of Ben he’d brought in yesterday screen left, and to the right….

  “What? Who is that? That’s Ben, right? Where did you get another younger picture of Ben?”

  ALEX: NOT BEN. MATCH.

  “You mean—You’re actually telling me that that’s not Ben on the right? It is, though, it’s got to be.”

  ALEX: NO. MATCH. LOOK

  Alex clicked again with the mouse and another screen came up. “Thomas J. Mulroy,” it said, “Phoenix, Arizona, 22 yrs old. Send matches to Sandra Garber, email sandyh@dworkingmc.com.”

  “So—this is for real? This is a real person?”

  ALEX: FILE BIG ENUF 4 BETTER MATCHES NOW—SEE?

  “Yeah, I get that, but—Holy shit, Alex, this is fuckin’ amazing! These two pictures are like twins. Are we going to get results like this with other matches? If we do….”

  Rajiv paused to let his brain compose his words, and while he paused, Alex typed some more:

  ALEX: MRE FILES BTTR MATCHES. HOW MANY TODAY?

  “Today? I haven’t checked today. Yesterday there were 214 million, so maybe 220 by today. So—you think we’ll get results like these for everyone?”

  ALEX: PROBABILTY HIGH—NT EVERYONE BT MOST

  “OK, so … can we check some other ones to see? Some other recent matches? I’m curious.”

  Rajiv asked this because it wasn’t normal operating procedur
e for the workers in the FaceMate offices to check the millions of results coming in. Photographs were processed and analyzed in the gut of the computer, compared to similar files, and the results emailed automatically to the submitters. A continuous process of matching was carried out every day, every second—every millisecond, actually—and if a more appropriate match was found, even many months after several previous results had been dispatched, the better match was automatically dispatched as well. There had been reports of late that people were getting better and better matches for their photos than the ones originally sent, but this was anecdotal up to now. Nothing yet had been documented as to the accuracy of the recent matches, given the more extensive files. And therefore, the discovery of Ben’s perfect matching with this Mulroy kid was a revelation to them both. Rajiv had asked for another recent match, and his request jolted Alex’s muscle-bound cranium into remembering that—yes!—he had another pair of photos loaded in the program not yet viewed, but just now ready to be seen.

  He scrolled, he clicked, and appearing on the screen, left side, the other half of the photograph that Rajiv had brought him yesterday at noon, the amazingly pretty girl. The right side of the screen was blank, waiting for a second image to be shown.

  “Alex!—Jesus, Alex, you scanned the girl in? A friggin’ dead girl? Why would you even do that?”

  Alex didn’t answer, he just shrugged, and then, after several seconds delay, typed on his keypad to load an image on the right side of the screen:

  LOOK, announced the screen.

  And then the letters disappeared and the pair of pictures came up suddenly, now on both sides of the screen. LOOK, he had been told, and therefore Rajiv looked. He leaned forward toward the monitor and examined, studied. There on the left hand side was the image of the girl Ben loved and lost when young—the photograph he’d brought to Alex yesterday. And on the right—well, damned if she wasn’t there again: A different photo of her, different background, different clothes, but obviously the same exact extraordinary beauty as the picture on the left, a breathtakingly gorgeous young girl of twenty or so, just as ‘button-cute’ as Eddie had told him on the plane: blonde hair of identical color in the photos to either side, features the same—exactly—pale blue eyes, not as intense as Ben’s but very striking nonetheless. Everything same from right to left—all except the dress. The girl on the left—Ben’s beloved girl Lizzie—wore a sweatshirt with the lettering of Red Bank High over a pair of fresh-pressed jeans. The Lizzie on the right wore more formal attire: an off-white blouse, a pleated skirt—not quite what one would expect contemporary girls to wear, but really, this wasn’t a modern-day girl—was it? It was a girl who’d died some thirty years ago.

  But where did this second picture come from? wondered Rajiv. Eddie told him in no uncertain terms that there was just that single snapshot in existence—And then it dawned on him that the program they were using could do this sort of magic transformation in a flash: It could Photoshop a subject’s hair, clothes; it could add a suntan, subtract one, add or delete scars, moles, whatever. Hell, it could add or subtract twenty years, thirty if need be. OK, but why would Alex bother to modify the picture that way?—unless….

  “That’s the same girl on both sides of the screen, isn’t it? Ben’s Lizzie?”

  Alex clicked his mouse, and another block of text appeared beneath a different pretty woman’s photo—the same woman as the picture formerly on the right, that is, but from a different angle and with a different expression on her face. And below it, the printed caption read:

  Liliana Alexandrovna Glinskaya, age 22, Moscow, Russia, email matches to Lili2441@vmail.rus

  “That’s the match?” Rajiv sounded astonished, primarily because he was.

  ALEX: SEE?

  “Yeah, I see, all right; I see—So—This isn’t Lizzie?”

  ALEX: LILIANA ALEXANDROVNA GLINSKAYA

  “This is the match?—Jesus, Alex, I’m speechless—I’m speechless that we’re getting incredible matches like this, sure, but I’m even more speechless that there are two women in the world as beautiful as these two are—Or these two were, I guess I ought to say; there’s only one who’s still around. So, it’s because of the bigger files, right? Two hundred million must be the critical number to make the matches this amazing.”

  ALEX: HVNT CHECKED BUT PROBABILITY WOULD SUGGEST ANSWR YES

  “OK, fantastic! Terrific! Wait till Eddie sees this stuff—and Mr. Atherton too. They’ll be totally blown away!”

  ALEX: U GONNA SHOW THEM?

  “Sure—I mean…. Well, I’m gonna send them to Eddie first. But as for Ben, Eddie’ll have to make that call. But … what are you planning to do with the guy and girl who submitted the matching pictures, though?—The guy in Arizona and the Russian girl in—where is it? Moscow?— Are you going to send the pictures of Ben and Lizzie back to them?”

  ALEX: NOT ME

  “Not you? So you’re telling me you’re not, right? Good; that’s a relief.”

  ALEX: I DNT SEND MATCHES BACK-CPTR DOES

  “OK, so—are you going to have the computer send the matches out—yes or no? I mean, it’d be pretty damn creepy wouldn’t it? After all, the pictures we matched this guy and girl up with were taken thirty years ago, and one of them isn’t even alive anymore.”

  ALEX: CPTR NOT PROGRAMMED 2 DECIDE

  “OK, I get that, Alex, but it’s programmed to do something, isn’t it?—So?—is it going to send the matches out or not?”

  ALEX: NOT GOING TO—ALREADY DID

  19

  Sandra Garber finished up at five but stayed around the dealership, as she often did, to hang out a little while with Tommy before he left. Tommy was wrestling with the rear end of a Chevy up on a hoist, doing something with the shocks—obviously the shocks, since those were the parts that Sandra had handed him from inventory earlier in the day. Tommy was sweet when you went to see him for a while before he finished up. He was always polite, always considerate—well, up to a point at any rate—just as long as you didn’t keep him from his work. One thing about Tommie, though: there wasn’t really anything that kept him from his work. Best mechanic in the place, now or ever—That’s what Mr. Dworkin said; and Mr. Dworkin wasn’t one to hand out compliments when compliments weren’t a hundred million years overdue.

  So Sandy chatted for a while, but got just as far with Tommie as she ever did—meaning nowhere. And after twenty minutes of telling him that there was a movie playing at the Multiplex that she heard was really good, and that she’d found a nice new burger joint that she thought he’d really like, and that she’d cashed her check a couple of days ago and had lots of dough to spend—you know, just in case he’d like to take an evening off and not touch the money he was saving up for school—After all that talking and hinting and some serious batting of eyes, well, what do you know, but he excused himself just like a hundred times before, seeing as there was all that stuff he had to do on the Olds he was working on at home, but as a consolation, giving her the consolatory comment that if he did go out with anyone from Phoenix it would definitely be with her—But as things presently stood….

  Same old story. Same old Tommy for the past two years. So after flirting and coaxing with no result whatever till—what was it now?—almost half-past five, well, what else could she do but hop in her banged-up Malibu, take the eighteen minute drive to her condo right off Scottsdale Road and Thomas, toss her purse on the breakfast table with disdain, as though some thirty-dollar bag was the most likely villain in all her social ills. She grabbed a can of orange pop and drank it down in one long frustrated gulp, then finally sat down at the computer in the living room to let some hot air vent by logging on and checking out her daily mail.

  Crap; junk—all the ordinary stuff again, of course. Her spam filter wasn’t as efficient as it ought to be, so lots of emails to delete. The first fifteen were garbage, like, totally, so she dumped those wholesale in one fell swoop. Then one from Janice Carver that she read—nothing urgent, nothi
ng she needed to respond to right away—and another from MasterCard that turned out to be just another snesaky ad—oh, and yet another ridiculous piece of junk mail after that: Refinance your home! What home!—Geez, how stupid did these advertising idiots think consumers were!—Straight to trash—DELETE—Why the heck do they keep on bothering folks for nothing, anyway?—And, let’s see, scrolling to the next one on the short list down….

  Ah, well, finally: This little item might finally be worth a look. It was from FaceMate, so either they wanted some back-pay for the work she’d previously got for free, or maybe—best case scenario—another cute young guy who looked a little bit like Tommy, but not quite on the mark. She’d gotten—what?—four responses from them so far, two fellows on the first email, ten days ago, looking remotely like Tommy, but the remoteness wasn’t really all that close. Then two more young guys on Saturday’s inbox—a whole lot nearer to what she wanted, but still not quite her cup of tea. They were getting closer at any rate; FaceMate, at any rate, hadn’t been a total waste of time. And so she opened this electronic mailing with at least a modicum of eagerness and anticipation. If they weren’t just trying to solicit twenty bucks for nothing, and they could eventually come up with a guy as cute as Tommy—how fantastic that would be! Heck, then she’d pay the twenty bucks—Gladly! Funny. Sandy didn’t quite understand the phenomenon herself, but something about this guy Tommy Mulroy struck a chord in her romantic sense. I mean, she wasn’t exactly some skanky broad herself. Lots of guys came onto her; she’d never had to throw herself at a handsome kid before.

  But with Tommie—just to be around him for a little while did her mind and spirit good, though precisely why she really couldn’t say. He’d never led her on in any way, never made suggestive comments like the other guys at work, never patted her behind, so it wasn’t his interest or charm or attention that drew her to him; it could only be his looks. And if a cute guy’s looks could light that huge a bonfire in her heart, then another guy who looked a whole lot like him might ignite her just as much.