TWICE

by Susanna Kleeman

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Here’s my deal. There’s lots to say and it’s pointless, you won’t believe me, not yet, but I’ll say it anyway. Let’s start with New York. My bike crash. Remember? The warehouse in Bushwick, the police bringing me back all stitched up? My first time in hospital, no hospitals or doctors for us in Scritchwood, right? And then one week after the head-hunter called?’

  I stared ahead, twisting my ropes. Let the bullshit reign.

  ‘That head-hunter. Out of the blue. A new kind of job, right? Nothing to do with programming. From nowhere. A “vision piece”, a “client recommendation”, “confidential”. So random, right?’

  His take at the time: he’d impressed someone without realising it, maybe one stray comment, not so surprising since he was so brilliant. And a tech revolution was happening then: young guns knowing what old farts didn’t, high ascents possible if you had a knack for it, which he did. Him and his machines. And he and I growing up shut off from everything in Scritchwood. So we came to things fresh, he’d explained to me then. He came to things fresh. He was on fire, pure instinct, could shape new landscapes, vision the future. He’d told me. Him pacing our room in Bushwick while I sat there nodding away on the sofa. The things you have to learn.

  ‘You remember, how much they loved me? From the start? “International strategic consultancy”. My own team, assistants, expense accounts, cell phones on four continents? Crazy money? Crazy, eh?’

  I recalled it. I spent time with friends. I read. I was studying everything then, going to college, getting educated, for both of us, while he jetted. We bought an apartment. There were social events, I came to a few, felt out of place. We were soulmates, he said. I used to be someone special, what was happening to me? he said. Was I developing a bald patch? He started spending two weeks a month on the West Coast.

  They were building tomorrow out there, he wanted to be part of it, who could blame him. On the fast track: new positions mooted with parent companies, venture capitalists. ‘The money’s the real creativity,’ he told me then. By then he’d met Don Thabbet, ‘You remember Don Thabbet?’ Big old reclusive venture capitalist, his big boss.

  It wasn’t just funding. Don and co had their own agenda, their own vision, were asking the big questions, commissioning the constellation of services to take mankind to the next level. Who wouldn’t want to be part of that? Astronauts of the mind. And they saw a place for him at the top table, good luck to them, good luck to him. I sold the bead and ran away.

  ‘You never met Don. You remember me telling you about him, though? Thabbet the Rabbit. My dad. Oh yeah,’ enjoying my stare. ‘Don’s my real dad, Alan wasn’t my dad, I was right the whole time, I was stolen, they totally lied to us. ‘Cept Don’s not quite my daddy either. Turns out he’s my, our, original. He…me and Sean? He made us. And the rest of us. Farmed us in tubes. Chips off the old block. We’re Don’s cuttings. We’re Don’s clones.’

  He let this ricochet a bit, for what it was worth, driving me on down slippery roads in the rain. Because it was about 2 am and relatively empty there were strange things: cones and signs, massive lorries, closed lanes, spotlights, road-fixing machines painting lines, moon buggy-like rovers on repair trucks, high-vis men at work with their hoods up. I’d never met Don Thabbet but remembered photos from the internet a long time ago: a big fat ancient thing in huge Yoko sunglasses and a white sailing cap on a yacht, skin cracked like a mosaic. Hard to remember those images, to say if Chris was his younger replica under the shades and blubber. Unlikely. I itched to search but was tied up and had no devices. I itched to search lots of things. The sessions I’d have later.

  ‘Yeah, chew on that. Cloning’s relatively trivial, in the Valley. Not just Don, they’re all at it, have been for ages, asexual reproduction, poking at the stuff of life. Wise up to what goes on in the world. That’s how they spend it: ultimate vanity projects: hacking death. Forget silicon—it’s carbon and protein now. Plenty of bio stuff you’ll have heard nothing of. The mystery lives of the nought point percenters. Welcome to my world. Getting you to post us your DNA.’

  Maybe it’s true, I thought then. Maybe there were lots of him. He could be mad and a clone, why not? It kind of made sense: them up to all sorts in their campuses, knowing everything about us, cloaking themselves, hatching a future we had no say in. Cloning themselves was no great stretch—they did it with sheep, right, had been doing so for years? He could be the clone of an old man and the clone of someone his age, he could have a double, a triple, why not? Certainly explained why they’d been so keen to hire him, his crazy rise. Were they all as bad as he was? No wonder he’d gone mad.

  Stay small.

  But it was so creepy, thinking about two Chrises: Mr Finger-Perfect prancing about in my flat being someone else, up to stuff, knowing my data, having his fun with me.

  Or maybe this stump Chris was the one having fun with me. Maybe they both had that eye scar, oh for that lifelog. Scars were easy: etch them on with lasers and stencils, no problem for robot-makers like them.

  And who was this them going to all that trouble, for what? Don Thabbet and his crack venture capitalist special-effects clone squad? Watch out, I told myself: big schemes, going Tal-like. Keep it simple.

  And the simple version was: I didn’t need to know anything, I already knew everything I needed to know about Chris, had sucked it up years ago, let him tell his fucking stories. Chris was a cock, always would be. Only Chris mattered and Chris would do or say anything to help Chris, no matter how many of him there were, if there was only one.

  ‘One day,’ my driver said, about a year after I slunk off, a year of riotous living at the cutting edge of pleasure, he got an invite, a one-to-one with the old man himself, Don Thabbet, at home. A white villa in the hills outside San Francisco. Butlers, ancient art, gracious living. There in a library of Italian trick wood panels, Don told Chris what Chris really was.

  ‘I look into his eyes, Nim. I can see it. He’s old and fat and bald but he’s me. I’m him. We’re the same. He’s been searching for me for years, found me by my blood after the crash, by his blood which is my blood, has had a watch out on our sequence forever, has been reeling me in slowly, watching from a distance. He shows me photos of when he was young. I want to puke. Do you know how it feels to see you in front of you, just a lot older and fatter? Your exact DNA sequence? To know it made you?’

  He ran his stump finger down his nose.

  ‘My clone daddy, his clone baby. He grew me, he lost me, he found me again. He showed me his hands, the whorls in his fingertips, just like my fingertips. Our palm lines are different though, slightly: we’ve been living different lives. But all that’s going to change now we’re together again. He talks haplogroups, other words I don’t know but will now: chronic disease we’re susceptible to, the pros and cons of our sequence, best strategies for optimum self-management. He strokes my face though he knows I won’t like it. Because he knows me, better than I know me. Because he is me but’s been at it longer with all the data. He feels my muscles, shows me our freckles, his age spots, tells me we’re in it together, knowledge-transfer, an adventurer who doesn’t want it to end. He’s got universities set up just to study our sequence, our own hospital. He manufactured me. Know how that feels? Growing up, feeling you’re so unique?’

  It was great, his daddy said, to have his stolen self back, to see what the genes did without informed guidance. Don’s other instances had been reared from birth in controlled environments. Don himself had enjoyed a very particular upbringing. But class will show itself, Daddy was proud of him, of what Chris had made of himself from the humblest of upbringings in Scritchwood, without Don’s husbandry. Blood will out.

  ‘I felt like a fool. The whole thing? My rise? Nepotism, not genius. I crashed at first: the shock, the craziness. I nearly ran back to you.’

  Nearly but not quite.

  ‘Then I started to think different, under Don’s mentorship. Don’s a genius, right? Don knows everythin
g, I am Don, I am a genius. But with things to learn. The feeling was: Crown Prince. So he starts to train me. To do it right you need to start from birth. But he’s fascinated by what I know instead: my ‘smarts’, what that brought to the sequence. Plus growing up with you, of course.’

  He patted my bound knee.

  Shadows and lights passed over his mad face. ‘We’re bonding. He’s telling me our mission, our fate and destiny, parts of the mission. I’m seeing the world through his eyes, you can’t imagine what he knows. For the first time I understand, at last: the con, the mystery. Me and Daddy love each other. No love like self-love. But then he introduces me to Sean.’

  Full-fingered Sean, my first visitor, according to this stump Chris.

  ‘Sean. My bad, my weird.’

  Bad Sean, from the same batch as Chris, but who hadn’t got stolen by Alan, hadn’t grown up with me in Scritchwood. Bad Sean who’d stayed in Don’s labs, my driver said.

  ‘Think it’s freaky to meet your eighty-year-old self? Imagine what it’s like to meet yourself now.’

  Not that freaky. Like meeting a long-lost twin, I imagined.

  ‘A you who hates you. A you brought up so weirdly you can’t imagine. Optimised from birth to exploit mutual core talents, reared mathematically, ergonomically, to become the ultimate Don Thabbet. Tweaked. A mistake in retrospect, Don says: the sequence needs more freedom or it curdles. You but totally fucked up. Imagine meeting that. We sit there, over the supper table in the white villa. We eat a meal. Like looking into a mirror and watching it hate you. Don sits there with us. Don watches. It’s intense, Don tells me later, the competitiveness you feel with a fellow instance. How well you’ve played the same dealt hand. And it’s much worse with a same-age instance, Don says, completely identical. Though nurture counts for so much.’

  A crazed laugh.

  ‘So now Don’s got two princelings: micromanaged Sean who’s turned out wrong, and stolen me, grown up in the bus with you away from hospitals beyond Don’s control, who Don now prefers, who Don feels like is most like him after all, the irony. Prodigal son. An heir and a spare. I’m the new toy. Sean’s the broken one, then. I win, for now. Sean vanishes, I don’t ask where. It’s time for me to enter the very inner circle. Have Don tell me the real stuff. We’re all feeling sorry for Sean, thwarted birthright. But that’s life.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘The things I find out then…Things I can’t take, Nim. Bad knowledge. Things that turn me away from Don. I wake up. And Don knows it. And then Sean’s back in the picture, the golden boy again since I’m on the downer. Reformed Sean, back on track, ready to do whatever Don tells him. If it means Sean can destroy me. And so I duck out and come to you, with this stuff I’ve got to tell the world. With your help. If it isn’t too late. If we can get to Flora before Sean does, find that book before he does, find out why he wants it.’

  Ah yes, the book, that biz. End bit needs more work, Chris. Rings a bit hollow. And was that relief on his face, to have finished his cockamamie tale?

  By now we were on the A40, passing bus garages, a big storage facility crowned by a sleigh-borne Santa, the Hoover building lit up green, a shiny American-style diner.

  ‘I need a coffee,’ he said.

  He veered fast across lanes into the car park of a small service station to our left, parked up by the air machines where there were no cars. He sat there shivering next to me for a moment, scouting for danger, stretching and rubbing his bitten hand.

  ‘Want a coffee?’

  I nodded. He’d have to take the gag out. I could do things with coffee: spit it into his mad lying face. He pulled his hoodie down low over his forehead, reached behind him to the back seat for this big black weird walking stick, unscrewed the base, plopped some pound coins into his palm, threw the stick into the back where it thwacked against unknown other equipment. I shuddered. He opened the door, got out of the car, slammed the door and went into the building, left me free of him for the first time but unable to move or do anything, tied to the seat, my whole face and body in pain. There were a few cars and people but no way to shout at them. I writhed in my burka, tried my utmost to loosen the ropes, bounce my body against the seat but no one noticed. A fat hunchbacked Moslem woman at eccentric prayer.

  He was gone a while, came back with two coffees. He looked worse, tight and pale.

  ‘Black. That’s how you take it, right, these days? If I take the gag out will you behave?’

  I nodded.

  ‘But will you? No shouting, attracting attention. No point and you mustn’t. You don’t know. I’m not about hurting you but I will hurt you if I have to. If you knew you’d understand. OK?’

  I nodded. He balanced the coffees by the gearbox, reached down to my feet and put his hands up the burka, brushing my jeans and scratched skin, watching my eyes. I flinched. He reached up higher, undid the knot behind my hair wedging the gag in, pulled the eye-slit of the burka down, fished the sodden gag and knot out of my mouth, let me breath.

  The joy. Moving my jaw and shredded lips and rough swollen tongue. Moving my face, my sore torn mouth back, my whole scratched tied body, my sore ankles and wrists, trying to wipe my wet face against the nylon burka, breathing through my mouth again.

  ‘Untie me Chris,’ I managed to say.

  ‘Not yet. When I’m finished, I’m not finished, you’ll try something.’

  He pulled the burka down under my chin so my whole lower face was exposed, bent my face back and tipped gulps of hot coffee gently into me. I braced for it to scald but the temperature was perfect, very drinkable. Or my mouth was numb by now. Bits dribbled down my face. It was sweet, I didn’t take sugar. So he didn’t know everything about me. But sugar was good, I needed sugar. I needed to drink, my mouth was raw.

  I closed my eyes and let the coffee flood me. I didn’t spit or shout or talk or say anything. He’d just regag me or worse and there was no one around. He’d do anything, whatever he was, that was clear. I had to wait for some flaw or chance, play along, bide for the right time, listen to the bullshit, hold my nerve. Chris or a clone, mad or plotting, it didn’t matter. Whoever he was he was acting mad and out in the world and either was or looked just like Chris, a person with a public profile, a person of some importance, who couldn’t be out in the world like this, who already had copters after him: bad for the stock price to have him rampant. There’d be doctors or security, already were by the looks of things. Build those bonds, work those ropes, till the doctors emerge. Positivity, planning and good sense had helped me many times, would help me now. He didn’t want to hurt me, he wanted my help. He said.

  He dabbed my mouth with the burka, wiped up the dribble.

  Afterwards it seemed to me the coffee tasted strange.

  7

  We drove in silence for a while, me enjoying my mouth back, twisting my body to lessen the pain, working out how to play it, what to say. Car spray smeared soft light, rain pattered on the roof, the wipers squeaked, our breath steamed up the windscreen so he opened his window a sliver—no fancy demisting in this car. We passed a Victorian water tower, four artificial hills, the low lights of an airfield, then pure countryside: lorries and their spray, cats’ eyes, the empty road. I felt better, calmer, buoyed by coffee, a warm glow. Tied and gagged under my burka but I’d find a way to handle this asswipe. He frowned at me. He seemed different and not in a good way: perked by caffeine but colder, tighter, a mode I recognised. Unsteadying mood swings, a cheap way to control me. You let him. Like normal, proof he was real Chris.

  But nothing was normal.

  Glower, you freak. Drum that stump all you like.

  ‘Sounds like you’ve been through a lot,’ I managed eventually. ‘I want you to know: whatever you’ve been through, Chris, I’m here for you. We’ll sort this together, Chris, like old times. Why are they after you? What have you done?’

  ‘What have I done? I told you: learnt stuff, not liked it, escaped to tell the realm about it.’

&n
bsp; ‘The realm?’

  ‘What we call…your world. People who don’t know…what’s up. The dumdums with their phones.’

  We turned on to the M25.

  ‘What you got to tell us?’

  ‘Their plans. What the tech’s for.’

  ‘And what is the tech for?’

  ‘World control. All those maverick drop-outs busy in garages, trips to India? All planned from way back, seeds planted in greedy heads, tech shown. A front, the latest in a long line of fronts. Long-term mission: crunchable world. Birth-to-death peeping, total access, exposed souls, deep orders, much worse planned. Everything searchable, recordable, trackable. Everything with its own barcode, smart code, like in the Bible. It’s not that they’re smart. It’s that your dumb.’

  ‘Big whoop,’ I said, riding a new tide of warmth and energy. ‘We know all that already: whistle-blowers. And even before that we all sort of knew anyway.’

  ‘Whistle-blowers are nothing,’ he said, ‘the ones you see on your social feed. They print rebels too. They want you to know, breaking it to you gently, your new reality, so you’ll self-edit like they want you to, now you know you’re always recorded. But, in the end, like anyone cares. Like with money. A key side project. They’re phasing it out, can’t you tell? No one asked you but they’re getting rid of money, over the next few years everything’s going to be cards and chips, then body chips. Your last cent trackable, your last twitch trackable, them knowing your cancers before you do, them placing your cancers, you completely known and slaved. Oh there’ll be some paper left, for the holdouts, the reenactors. Till they die out. The dumdums’ll give it up happily, like they gave up everything else. Jab you with anything, just so long as you can post those cat vids.’

  I wanted to laugh, I nearly did. I felt good, too good. Relaxed, even, tied there.