The Echo Wife

by Sarah Gailey

  I closed my eyes and forced myself to breathe.

  I wasn’t prepared for this at all. I didn’t know how to take care of her, how to understand her needs. I didn’t even know how to find out what those needs were. I wasn’t ready for this, and I shook with the knowledge that I couldn’t do it right, that I would make mistakes layered on mistakes, that it would all go wrong because I didn’t have any of the information I knew I needed to do it right.

  I never wanted children, and I never wanted this.

  But, I reminded myself, I hadn’t been prepared for any of it—for the fact that my husband didn’t love me, for the fact that Martine even existed. For the things she was capable of and the things she had already asked of me. Her care and feeding were hardly frightening by comparison.

  The sound of running water stopped. I pushed myself to my feet and walked into the bedroom to get clothes for Martine. I rummaged through boxes until I found a dress I never wore, one that Nathan had bought for me as a gift, years before. I studied it with new understanding: the full line of the skirt, the scoop of the neckline, the fall of the sleeves.

  When Nathan bought that dress for me, I remember being baffled. I couldn’t imagine why he would think that I would ever wear such a thing, a dress that was so unlike any of my other clothes. I remember being faintly angry that he would give me such an unsuitable gift.

  But, I realized, it hadn’t really been for me.

  So before I tapped on the bathroom door to hand the dress over, I knew that I would let Martine keep it.

  It had been hers all along.

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTEEN

  By the time Martine and I arrived at the lab, Seyed was already there, as usual. The shadows under his eyes were deep. His face had a hangdog quality to it, and I reflexively resented him for trying to work the exhaustion angle. I was tired too. That didn’t change the fact that he had betrayed me.

  Still. I couldn’t help softening a little at the sight of him. I don’t often feel pity, but that doesn’t make me cruel. I’m not one to exploit vulnerability for the sake of punishment.

  I’m not a monster.

  “What do you have for me?” I asked as soon as we were through the airlock. He handed me a felt-backed clipboard without wasting time on a greeting.

  “Numbers are good so far,” he said. “I pushed the first dose of cortical primer twenty minutes ago.”

  I scanned the chart. Seyed had named this subject Nate-2. “Destroy anything with this labeling on it,” I said, handing him back the chart. “This subject is named 4896-Zed. And push an HGH inhibitor, will you?” I looked at the temperature reading on the base of the new Nathan’s tank. “It’s a little warm in here.”

  Seyed nodded and got to work. I wasn’t being any harsher on him than usual, but something of the old easy trust between us was still gone, the same way it had been the night before. There was no room for him to make mistakes like letting the temperature inside a specimen’s tank drift too high. There was no space for banter. As always, I told him the work to be done, and he did it—but something was broken between us, and I couldn’t imagine a way to get to a future where that wasn’t broken. We would just have to keep hobbling forward, leaning our weight on that fracture.

  I left Seyed behind, feeling uneasy. I joined Martine at the wobbly table in the far corner of our lab, where everything was labeled FOOD USE ONLY. Both of her hands were wrapped around a cup of peppermint tea. She was staring hard at the specimen tanks, her brow furrowed hard enough to deepen the nascent line on her forehead, the one I’d noticed before.

  I wasn’t prepared for her, and I didn’t understand her needs, but this, I could read easily enough.

  This, I could solve.

  * * *

  When I first proposed neurocognitive programming to Lorna van Struppe, she treated the conversation as a learning opportunity. I was her research assistant at the time, fresh and bright-eyed and ready to change the world. The ink on my doctoral thesis was still wet. I was a year away from meeting Nathan, still carrying water for Lorna as she explored enhanced embryonic development in reproductive cloning.

  To her, my idea—shaping the mind of a clone as it formed—was an exercise. It was a critical thinking lesson. She had wanted me to figure out on my own why the thing I was talking about was impossible.

  I’d raised it as a hypothetical, of course—a late-night what-if to kill time while the autosampler ran a routine. We ate pizza off of paper plates that bent under the weight of the grease in each slice, and we talked about why my idea would never work.

  “First,” Lorna said, “you’d need a full cognitive map of the mind you wanted to re-create.”

  “A full cognitive map of anyone’s mind is almost impossible to create with any degree of accuracy,” I said, taking the position she wanted me to take, opposing my own suggestion. Showing her that I understood the holes in the concept.

  “Then you’d need to find a way to impose that cognitive map on a … what? A clean brain?” She said it without condescension, without malice, but the word “clean” had a weight to it that reflected the absurdity of the notion.

  I’d pointed my pizza at her head. “Maybe we could come up with a mind-wipe ray. Zap, and your brain is clean as a whistle, and you can stamp someone else’s brain on it. Easy-peasy.”

  She smiled. “There you go. Perfect. So you use the brain-zapper, and then you pop the new framework in there … how?”

  “A computer chip?” I said, my mouth half-full. “Or … hormonal conditioning, maybe?”

  “Oh, perfect, hormonal conditioning.” She nodded overemphatically, her eyes crinkling. “Because we totally know which hormones correlate to which behaviors. We know that with absolute certainty. Not a bog of warring hypotheses at all.”

  “Right, it’s easy,” I’d said brightly. “And then you just have to lock in that framework to keep the clone from deviating too far during their first few weeks.”

  “Piece of cake.” Lorna had laughed, and I’d laughed with her. I’d accepted that my idea was ridiculous, full of holes, impossible.

  But later that night, I’d caught her watching me thoughtfully, and a few days later, she’d handed me a white paper on neonatal theories of cognitive development.

  “Read this,” she’d said, and I read it, and I began to understand.

  * * *

  “Are you ready to get to work?” I asked.

  Martine blinked, looked at me. The words seemed to take a moment to process. “Sure,” she said. “What do you need?”

  “Well.” I sat across the table from her and looked at her as though she were my equal. “We have a tricky job to do. What do you know about neurocognitive programming?”

  Her face went very still. “I’m sorry,” she said slowly. The edges of her voice were polished smooth. “I think I misheard you. Please, would you be so kind as to—”

  “Yeah,” I interrupted, impatient already with the way she couched her words in layers of apology, soaking up responsibility in advance, getting ahead of anger I hadn’t even felt yet. “Programming. We have to program Nathan’s brain. Do you know how that works?”

  She took a sip of her tea and stared at a spot just over my shoulder. That line in her forehead grew just a little deeper. “No,” she finally said. There were layers to that “no.” A different person would have listened for whatever kind of pain was hidden there. A different person would have paid attention to them, would have asked her what was wrong.

  We didn’t have time for that, though. We didn’t have time to waste on her emotions. Seyed had already started pushing the cortical primer that would help to define the structure of the new Nathan’s brain as it formed. We needed to get to work.

  “Normally,” I said, “we would start this whole thing with neural mapping.” I watched her for a sign of recognition, saw none. She stared at me, blank as a cell-frame, waiting. Always fucking waiting. “We take a picture of the brain we want to replicate,” I tried, a
nd she nodded once.

  I mentally adjusted the way I was going to need to discuss this process with her. I simplified every explanation as much as I could. Since I’d first begun applying for corporate funding, I’d been forced to prepare consumer-friendly explanations of my process. We weren’t there yet. We hadn’t reached the point at which I needed to admit wealthy customers to my lab for invasive, inconvenient tours. But I’d spent so much time figuring out how to explain my work to someone who couldn’t hope to understand it, and I dug deep into those explanations in order to talk to Martine. I spoke to her using every strategy I’d developed for the eventual day when I would start pitching the cloning process to a wider, stupider market.

  It would have been easier, in many ways, to simply leave her in a corner, someplace she wouldn’t get in the way.

  But I had seen what happened when she destabilized, when she thought too much about who she was and why she had been made. I had already buried that body and dug it back up again. The way she’d been watching the specimen tanks, leaving her in an out-of-the-way corner to think things over while I worked felt like more of a risk than I was willing to take.

  Those were all the justifications I made to myself about why I was willing to spend the time it took to explain the cloning process to Martine.

  But, of course, there are always other reasons.

  I didn’t want to work alone, just me and Seyed and the damaged thing between us. And maybe I didn’t want to leave Martine alone, either. Everything was wrong, but keeping both of them close, broken as they were, seemed better than being without them. Some part of me hoped that between the two of them, I could salvage one entire ally. And besides all that, I really did need Martine’s help. I needed more from her than I cared to admit.

  I continued my explanation of neural mapping, trying to bring the entire concept down to a level Martine would understand. “We take a picture of how the brain works. How it makes choices, how it reacts to different stimuli. Then we make adjustments based on how we want the clone to be different.”

  “Right,” she said, her jaw tight enough that I barely saw her lips move.

  “That’s what we use to make a subject’s brain work like the original’s brain, or differently from the original’s brain,” I continued. “It’s complicated, the way we get the brain into shape—we have to deal with each section independently first, and then we deal with the way the sections interact with each other.” In hindsight, Martine followed all of this fairly easily, but at the time, I felt certain that I was only bewildering her. I shook my head. “None of that is important. The thing that matters is that we make those adjustments up front, then program the clone’s brain using the new map. That’s how we make sure that, for instance, a clone of a politician will never try to pretend to be the politician, even though they look alike.” I paused, trying to read her face. “Is this making any sense to you?”

  She nodded again. “Sure,” she said. “So, do you have a map for Nathan?”

  I pulled my tablet out of my bag, pulled up a file, and showed it to her. “This is from five years ago. He helped me test a new scanner. It’s the same scanner we use now, so we have all the data we would have otherwise, even if it’s old.” I tapped the screen, showing her an image of a thin slice of Nathan’s brain. It was highlighted in colors that would mean nothing to her. “It’s not ideal, but it’s what I’ve got.”

  Martine studied the image. She touched a patch of bright green with the tip of her index finger. When she made contact with the screen, the image vanished, replaced by a long string of data I’d never bothered to analyze. “You said that ‘we’ had work, but it sounds to me like you’re the one who has work. What am I here for?” She said it simply enough, but her eyes flicked to mine when she asked what she was there for, and I felt the weight of Nathan’s death behind the question.

  I set the tablet down. “We have a five-year-old scan of Nathan’s brain to work with, right?” I asked. “Well, Seyed and I can run the analysis to help us get a handle on what traits we would have programmed into a clone of the person who Nathan was then. But … he’s different now than he was when we ran that scan.” I cleared my throat as Martine looked away. “He was different, I mean. In the moments before his death, he would have reacted differently to a lot of stimuli than he would have when I took that scan.”

  “I didn’t know him five years ago,” she whispered.

  I clenched my fist in my lap, then stretched my fingers wide. I reminded myself to stay calm. I reminded myself to stay focused. “That’s probably for the best,” I said. My voice seemed to come from a far-off place. “You won’t have as many biases as I will. You’ll be able to give a more immediate analysis of his behaviors.”

  She looked at the brain scan with naked longing. I wondered, briefly, if I’d made a mistake. Martine breathed in through her nose slowly, visibly composing herself piece by piece—her forehead smoothing, her mouth softening, the desperation in her eyes ebbing away like sand through clenched fingers. “Right,” she said once she appeared to be calm again. She pointed once more to that bright green section of brain. “What does this part mean?”

  I pulled up the supplementary data, trying to remember the experimental systems we’d used for mapping back then. “That’s his amygdala,” I murmured. “Memory, emotion, attention—it’s a good place to start. We usually program that one early.” I found the section of the supplementary notes that corresponded to the slide she was looking at, and read the first bullet point aloud. “‘Amygdala stimulus in response to memory related to image 785-W.’ Hang on, all the images are here too.” I opened the W folder, found the seven-hundreds subfolder, and there it was.

  785.

  Me.

  “Oh,” Martine said softly, tilting her head to try to see the picture the right way up. I wore a low-cut white dress, with a sapphire pendant resting halfway between the hollow of my throat and the nock of my breasts. My hand rested on a disembodied elbow, and I knew that Nathan’s father was just out of the frame. In the photo, I was beaming, my eyes bright.

  In the photo, I looked like I’d never been more sure of anything in my life.

  I couldn’t think of what to say. It all felt so unnecessary, so melodramatic. There’s no need to make it a production, my father growled deep in the recesses of my mind. But there was no getting around the facts, regardless of how mawkish they felt.

  “That slide,” I said evenly, “is a snapshot of Nathan’s amygdala responding to a photo of me walking down the aisle on our wedding day.” I returned to the page of supplementary notes and pointed to his oxytocin levels, his endorphins. “These are elevated, which tells us that he feels—that he felt happy.” I did not say that the levels reflected that Nathan still loved me at the time the scan was taken.

  I let myself believe that Martine wouldn’t be bright enough to put it together.

  She pushed her chair back from the table without speaking. Her chair scraped against the tile, shrill and sudden, as she stood. She stalked across the lab and threw open the cupboard Seyed had been raiding when we caught him just a couple of days prior. I clenched my jaw, but I knew better than to try to predict what she was doing or why. She had proven that in the garden the night we buried Nathan.

  She returned to the table with a fresh notebook in one hand and a box of ballpoint pens in the other. She opened the notebook, made a bullet point on the first page, and wrote “785-W: Amygdala” after it. She looked up at me with my mother’s gray eyes and my father’s hard, flat mouth.

  “So,” she said, her voice as clipped as mine usually was. “We’ll need to change that in the next draft. How do we do it?”

  * * *

  Five years before, when I had taken the test-map of Nathan’s brain, he had still loved me. He had loved me enough to come into the lab on weekends for a month, while I perfected my method for running the scans. He had loved me enough, too, to come into the lab on weeknights, bringing food so we could share dinners withou
t disrupting my eighteen-hour days. I was trying to solve what felt like a thousand problems at once, back then. I remember leaning across the table and kissing my husband, and thanking him for being one of the only things in my life that didn’t need fixing.

  Nathan loved me, I believed, and at the time, that was enough for me. I thought it was enough for him, too, back then.

  But I couldn’t figure out when that changed. Surely it was before the scrambled-egg morning. A decision like the one he made, to begin stealing my notes, to take my research and use it to end our marriage—that’s not a decision that happens because some eggs are bad.

  The way I see it, you mostly stop loving a person the same way you stop respecting them. It can happen all at once, if something enormous and terrible falls over the two of you. But for the most part, it happens by inches, in a thousand tiny moments of contempt that unravel the image you had of the person you thought you knew.

  I’ve been over it so many times. Our life together, our marriage—I’ve spent more nights than I can count awake and wondering where all those tiny moments were. When was the first moment that Nathan looked at me with disdain? How many times was he resenting me without me realizing it? Where did all that indifference live?

  I can find a lot of the moments, but they don’t seem to be enough. They come together like the skin of a person, but without bones or muscles or a central nervous system to hold the thing upright. I’ll never know what I missed.

  I’ll never understand enough to be satisfied.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHTEEN

  All told, it took Martine and me two weeks to complete our initial review of Nathan’s cognitive mapping.

  Here are some things that I was wrong about:

  •  Green beans. Nathan didn’t like them. He never had. I had never read that part of his initial scan closely, didn’t check his food preferences against what I’d thought was true. Why would I? He’d been telling me he liked green beans for years, lying for some reason that was forever opaque to me. Martine knew he hated them. She said that he thought they tasted like sulfur.