Drs. Kim and Karlsson bring over a gurney from the far wall and four of them lift the capsule’s entire platform onto the gurney, clicking it into place.
It’s the weirdest thing, watching someone move your unconscious Facsimile. Watching Patel shift her arm, Adebayo steady her head, Kim reposition her legs. Like when your hand or leg or arm falls asleep and you brush it with your feeling hand. They’re both your appendages, but the sensation’s one-sided.
With the platform secured in place, Kim and Karlsson push the gurney out of the room and into the hall. I follow a pace behind, staring at her feet. Bare, so pink and clean and perfect. Because she’s never had a blister, never worn uncomfortable shoes.
Never stood.
Never walked.
It’s all the weirdest thing.
LUCY
I wake up alone.
At least, by appearances. I’m the only one in the room, lying on my back on a bed. Heavy, dead weight. Like a carcass, though I’m (alive) conscious.
I can feel them (her) watching. She has to be.
It’s all white. Walls, floor, ceiling. Twin bed and single chair, pressed up against the wall. Doors, one normal, one sci-fi, its outlines barely visible. White ambient light, no windows. White and even more fucking whi—
No.
In the corner of my (her, her, her) eye. On the white bedside table.
An orange vase with a single orange flower.
LUCILLE
We watch through an observation window in an adjoining room. One way. So we can see her, but she can’t see us.
Our room’s dark. Hers glows with Life2’s incessant bright light. Stark, sterile, white. Except, on the bedside table, a speck of color. Like a single drop of paint. An orange flower in an orange vase.
Lucy opens her eyes, blinks, rolls her—my—head to the side, and Dr. Thompson leaves her place at the observation window, striding across the dark room toward the open door. I turn to watch her go, and see Isobel standing in the doorway. A silhouette against the hallway’s blinding light.
Dr. Thompson breezes past her as she takes one smooth side step out of the way.
LUCY
Down past my feet, the sci-fi door slides open, and Dr. Thompson comes in. I—
I, I, I. I’m an I.
But I’m not me.
Not Lucille.
Looking at the flower, I try it out. Whispering, so low there’s no real sound, only differently shaped air. “I’m not Lucille.”
It doesn’t help.
I try to sit up. Doesn’t work. My muscles are…(all those muscles in all those pods, suspended in blue gel, living meat) bio-goop. That’s what I am, right?
Printed.
Extruded.
Grown.
I try to move again. Fail. And my right hand starts to shake, vibrating on the mattress by my side.
Dr. Thompson pulls the chair over to my bedside and sits. “Hello, Lucy.”
I watch her with my head still turned toward the flower since I can’t turn it back. Her expression is predatory. Her eyes a-fucking-light. Like she’s waiting for a miracle. Like she’s owed one.
“Do you mind if I call you Lucy?” Her tone grates. It’s alien. Singsong sweet like she’s talking to a beloved pet, and it makes me feel like I’m, I’m, I’m…“I’m going to choke,” I say, watching Cass unwrap another Starburst and shove it into her already full mouth. She chews, slowly, dramatically, two-thirds of the pack down, one-third to go. “Seriously, Cass…”
My hand shakes.
“…I don’t know the Heimlich.”
And she smiles wide, Starburst juice on her teeth. “Yesh you oo.” Then leans over and spits the wad out onto the grass.
I grin at her, triumphant. “Told you you couldn’t do the whole pack.”
Laughing, she shoves my shoulder. “Not my fault your enormous mouth gave you an advantage. Next time I’ll—”
“No,” I say. My sixth word. Too. Bright. I’m. Not. Lucille. No. Feels significant.
She nods. Her eyes shift to my hand. I try to move (hide) it.
Can’t.
“The muscle spasms are normal,” she says. “Your nervous system is rebooting. Essentially. It will take time for the connections to solidify.”
I try again. One more time.
My hand moves. Jerkily. “Normal,” I say. Seven.
Thompson nods, brow creasing. The light in her eyes dims. I (Lucille) know(s) that look. It’s doubt.
Disappointment.
Resignation.
Her shoulders drop. She tips her chin up. Microgestures. But they say Not again.
She thinks it didn’t work.
LUCILLE
When she moves, her hand jerking awkwardly at her side, I feel it. Not literally. But like that horror-movie gag where the subject and their reflection in a mirror move separately.
“Normal,” she echoes Dr. Thompson. Her voice—mine, but not mine. Different. The way you sound strange to yourself in videos—comes through the speakers mounted somewhere above me on the wall.
I can feel the word inside my mouth.
I swallow, shift closer to the window.
The others are already packed in tight, noses nearly to the glass. Holding their breath.
Then she says, “How long are you going to sit there staring at me? Figure you got a good enough look when you were putting me together.”
Around me, the others exhale. Ecstatic. There are whispered cheers, silent high fives.
And me?
I’m an amalgam. Shock and amazement and anticipation and relief. Watching her feels like seeing a new color for the first time. The impossible made possible. A living, breathing paradox. One that makes me not just me, not only me, but so much more.
LUCY
“How long are you going to sit there staring at me?” I say. Eight, nine, ten, eleven…forget it. “Figure you got a good enough look when you were putting me together.”
She beams at me. Like a spotlight. I’ve (Lucille’s) never seen her smile like that. I’d cringe, but I can’t move. I feel helpless. Trapped. I can feel my body, but I’m a passenger in it. A trespasser.
“What are you thinking?”
My mouth fills with saliva. I concentrate and manage to swallow it down. “I can’t move.”
“Rebooting,” Thompson repeats. “And your muscles are—”
“I’m aware. What I mean is, I need help moving.”
“Oh,” she says, “of course.” And glances at the wall to my right.
A second later, Kim and Adebayo come through the door.
Dr. Kim stops a foot back from me, hands up. “What do you…”
“I want to sit up.”
They each take an arm and shift me, propping me up against the wall. “Good?” Adebayo asks.
I try to nod. My head lolls to one side. I manage to center it. “Thanks.”
Thanks.
Thanks.Thanksthanksthanksthanksthanksthanksthanksthanksthanksthanksthanksthanksthanksthanksthanksthanksthanks…“Thaaaaaaaaaaaanks,” he says.
Smells like…nothing. Plastic-wrapped, blister-packed, boxed, stacked, and sealed, nothing. The quiet sound track of decade-old pop music. The glare of fluorescent lights and dingy linoleum.
Sweat in my hair. On my lip.
Shame in my stomach. Dread like a living thing, as deep as my—
Bones.
It’s bones. Bode’s T-shirt. An American flag. The Stars and Stripes. They’re all made of (femurs, mandible, clavicle, twenty-seven for each hand, separated, splayed, encased in blue goo) bones.
It’s gross. Disturbing.
Beautif—
“What happened
?” Thompson asks. Eyes wide. Perched forward on the edge of her chair.
“Memory.”
The room, beyond my breathing, my heartbeat, the tick, tick, tick of the second hand on Adebayo’s watch, is silent.
“Of?”
“Target,” I say. “Yester—” No, not yesterday. “What day is it?”
“Thursday,” Thompson says, “July thirtieth.”
I’d lost two and a half weeks.
“Are you…” Thompson trails off. I’ve never seen her stumble. “Can you describe it? The memory? What does it feel like to experience one that isn’t yours?”
“Not mine,” I say, and roll my head to face the wall to my right. “How is it not mine?”
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 R
apidReplicate 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.
Half Life Page 9
