They lead me back to the conference room, where Dr. Kim uses the tablet to pull up a digital image of a brain on the wall’s screen.
“We call it MimeoMem,” Thompson says. “The process we use to digitize your connectome, the sum of everything that makes you you, and upload it to the Life Squared supercomputer, ready to be downloaded, or more accurately, incorporated into your Facsimile’s wetware.”
“Brain,” Dr. Kim clarifies.
I nod, touching the white tabletop, matching my fingertips to their reflections, one at a time, again and again. “That much computing power,” I say. “They…” They. A ridiculous concept now that I’m sharing a room with an iteration of “them,” that catch-all moniker for those nameless, faceless people out there, somewhere, making discoveries. Advancing the narrative of humankind. The things you glimpse in headlines. Take bites of by watching TED talks or reading your mom’s copies of Scientific American. “I read that scientists have only begun to digitize the connectome of a mouse. That there isn’t enough computer memory in the whole world to do what you say you’re doing.”
Dr. Kim smiles. “The world doesn’t know about us.”
“Why not? If you can do all of this, why keep it secret?”
“The subject is…contentious,” Thompson says. “And Life Squared believes that we can do the most good off the public stage. You’ve had the barest glimpse of our capabilities. We wouldn’t want prolonged international furor over issues the average person is incapable of comprehending to curtail that progress.”
I tap my fingers to their reflections in order, pinky to index, again and again. “Say I agree. What does that look like? RapidReplicate. MimeoMem. All of it.”
“It is a ten-week process, counting from the date of your stem-cell retrieval. Eight for RapidReplicate, which includes a series of procedures to procure the necessary genetic material for duplication and to facilitate the Facsimile’s growth, such as body scans, the Mimeo, and memory tests for future verification. You’ll need to make yourself available for these, but otherwise the time requirement is modest. Following consciousness, there is a two-week adjustment period during which we’ll assess the Facsimile’s structural and mental integrity in preparation for integration.
“Upon completion, this trial requires that you and your Facsimile embark on a four-week field test, during which time it will live with you and perform duties as would be desirable to our future clients. Spend time with your friends and family, fulfill your obligations. Be you without detection.”
“You mean don’t get caught.”
“Yes. It’s imperative, not only for the success of the trial but for our general purposes, that all of your dealings with us remain confidential. Hence the NDA.” Thompson smiles at me, close-lipped and blandly congenial. “Your Facsimile’s trial will be our final test before taking RapidReplicate to market. With your help, we’ll cross the line from experimentation to implementation. And a vital aspect of that is secrecy.
“Our clients don’t want a twin, they want an expanded self, the capacity to exceed lofty expectations without sacrificing anything. They want to be attentive spouses, parents, friends, while simultaneously running companies and leading nations. They want to explore their truly limitless potential. And they want the credit for it, as a single individual. Detection, even among those closest to them, would defeat that purpose.”
“And if she is? Detected?”
“The trial terminates.”
Kim adds, “And we do damage control.”
“If it’s successful, then what happens when it ends?”
“The asset returns to us,” Thompson says, “to be decommissioned or repurposed as we see fit, and you continue on with your life knowing you were an essential aspect of the greatest achievement in history.”
I can’t name the feeling in my gut when she says that. Excitement? Apprehension? It’s a chimera. Motley and surreal. If I weren’t sitting here, touching this table, breathing this air, I wouldn’t believe this place exists. Even with all of that, it’s part figment. Reality, but one with a purple-tinged sky.
“I still don’t understand. Why me?”
Dr. Thompson’s brow creases as she tips her head. “Lucille,” she says, holding my eye, “surely you know that you are an exceptional young woman. And we are in the business of exceptionality.
“You will be our capstone. Your Facsimile, the first fully functional, adult human duplicate, a scientific marvel that will change the world. Would you give that position to anyone but the best?”
The best. I want to believe it. I want to believe it so bad.
I drop my focus to the tabletop, so perfect and smooth and reflecting the doctors’ images keenly enough that I can see their features, their expressions as they watch me, and the moment they share a brief, expectant look.
All the shoulds. Should’ve deleted that last email, but I didn’t. Shouldn’t have clicked, researched, called, but I did. Should feel skeptical, nervous. Afraid. But I don’t.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt this tug. Pressure, the knot in my chest, whatever. Pulling at me, whispering, Keep up, keep up, keep up. A current of expectations I’ve kept my head above, but only just. Only barely. Or, maybe, not at all. Because every time I excel at one thing, I fail at another.
But this. A second me. Four hands instead of two. Two minds instead of one. Forty-eight hours in a day. I could do anything. I could do everything.
Four whole weeks to be me, but better.
To be me, but more.
Before and after.
That’s how I think of it. It’s that revolutionary.
Before, I thought about this summer and felt…dread. A whole summer of me? Solitary, daughter-of-divorcés, left-behind me? Yep, crushing, weight-of-an-SUV-bearing-down-on-me dread.
But that was before.
And this is after.
After I signed a contract with a multibillion-dollar science and technology company on the brink of altering the course of human life as we know it. Well, for a minuscule subset of “human life,” to be known about by almost no one. Because Life2’s advancements are “proprietary,” Thompson told me. “We have to protect our financiers’ investments. And ensure that our technology doesn’t end up in the wrong hands.”
“Not to mention,” Dr. Kim added, focusing on drawing what would be the first of many samples of my blood, “that global shitstorm we mentioned going public would cause.”
I’d watched the vial fill with deep black-red liquid, and made a mental note to google cloning laws when I got home.
Because that’s another part of after. Watching old interviews and reading articles about Dolly, the first animal successfully cloned using adult cells, and newer ones about Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, the macaque monkeys cloned in China a few years ago. Learning that in 2005, the United Nations called for a nonbinding ban on human cloning, that seventy countries forbid it, but that no law prohibits it in Colorado. And that there’s an ever-present moral, ethical, secular, and religious debate about it, including concepts like “human dignity” and, as the Vatican itself put it, a person’s “right to be born in a human way.”
But what about a clone that isn’t born but made? Assembled?
Before, I thought about assignments, grades, college application hooks, SAT prep, and whether or not Cass would invite me to whatever her friends planned next.
After, I think about assignments, grades, hooks, prep, whether or not I’ll ever actually talk to Cass again, and the semantics of “reproduction” in the context of zygotes and fertilization versus literal duplication, like printing two copies of the same page. Personhood, individuality, and if it’ll work to keep her in the mother-in-law suite above the garage for a month.
So, okay. A revolution, but one that’s still in progress.
It’s all progress. Swimming with
that current of expectations but feeling like someday soon, I’ll finally be able to touch the bottom, and maybe even stand.
I focus on that as I settle into my seat for my first Intro to Business class. My stomach’s tight. I’m the first one here, twenty minutes early, and I check the schedule three times to make sure this is the right room. A medium-sized lecture hall with tiered seating and tables instead of desks—I picked the one that’s front and center. Beside my laptop, I open my textbook to the first chapter, and wait. Wondering who will sit in the three other seats at this table. Hoping the professor’s nice. Soaking it in because this is where I’ve worked so hard to be.
Not this class, specifically. But college, the future, this feeling. A place that’s big and limitless. Where I’m not an overachiever or Cass’s plus-one or a daughter too oblivious to realize her parents’ perfection is a lie, I’m just me. Whoever I am.
I stretch my arm out on the table and stare at the tiny scab in the crook of my elbow from the latest blood draw. Glucose, cholesterol, LDL, HDL, triglycerides, STI screening, and a pregnancy test, though I told them that was pointless. Saturday’s the stem-cell retrieval, then they’ll start.
I wonder if she’ll remember this. The cool surface of the table growing warm beneath my arm. The bite of the needle drawing my—our—blood. The nervous flop of my stomach as the door opens behind me and a group of students starts down the stairs, talking while they pick their seats without a glance at me or my empty table. I wonder if any of them are in my group. No one responded to my message, though it shows that three of the four have seen it. More people file in now, and I turn forward, opening a new doc on my computer to take notes.
Ten weeks from Saturday, and she’ll be here.
Ten weeks, and I’ll be more, enough, no longer alone.
* * *
I don’t get used to it. The white. The general starchiness. Like the designer said, “I want the place to look like the feel of squeaking your finger across a clean plate.” Each time I walk through the doors feels like the first time, like I’m tripping through a crack into a skewed universe. One where I’m Lucille Harper, eighteen-year-old freshman at DU and subject LH2010, an identifier given to “maintain your anonymity,” Thompson said, “for when I present our progress to the Board.”
The lying turns out to be surprisingly easy. At home, because my parents are so busy being mid-divorce and I’m so good at being self-governed that apart from being driven around, I’m basically a nonentity already and my extra absences go utterly unnoticed. And at Life2, because I don’t think they give a single shit. Not about what I’m studying or how my life looks, only that I’m here.
And when I’m here, I’m meat.
Today, I’m tenderized meat.
They throw around words like “extraction” and “multipotency” with accompanying needles. It helps “streamline” the process, Dr. Thompson tells me as I lie on an exam table, wearing a Life2-specific set of white scrubs, with a numb scalp and aching hip. “The somatic cells found in your blood may be multipotent, meaning they have the capacity to develop into any of several cell types, but their primary purpose is to regenerate damaged tissue or replace dead cells.”
I swallow. My throat’s dry, and my jaw’s sore from clenching my teeth. “Not to grow a second brain.”
“No.” She smiles thinly. It curves her lips, lifts her cheeks, but that’s all. Mechanical. Intention and physical response, not the consequence of an actual feeling. “Which is why we retrieve samples from as many locations as possible. To speed up the process and better ensure success.”
I lift a hand to touch a fresh bandage stuck to my hair, holding a cotton ball over the hole Dr. Adebayo, the resident neurosurgeon, cut in my head. “Constructive criticism to benefit paying clients?”
“Yes?”
“Contrary to what the video suggested, that was neither painless nor minimally invasive.”
She arches an eyebrow.
“Knock people out. Or at least give them the option.”
She stands. “Noted.” And leaves, the door sliding shut behind her.
For a while I stare at the ceiling. Thinking about needles and samples and vials and ten short weeks, then slowly I sit up. The door opens again, revealing Isobel this time, holding a bin filled with my neatly folded clothes.
I move, shifting my legs off the table and pursing my lips at the pain in my hip where they took hematopoietic stem cells from my marrow. “Administrative assistant and nurse?”
“I called you a car.”
Hands gripping the edge of the table, half-numb head hanging, I say, “Thanks.”
“I remember—” She cuts herself off, and I look up. The moment my attention brushes her face, her expression flips from frustrated to beatific. She takes two efficient strides across the room, sets the bin on the table beside me, and says, “I hope you aren’t too uncomfortable,” then goes.
* * *
I run down the hall, but the door’s already closed, and I can hear Professor Mathieson lecturing inside.
Hand on the door, I pause to catch my breath, then squeeze the handle oh so slowly, like that’ll make me invisible or rewind time twenty minutes or, hell, an hour, so instead of waiting for my dad—“I promise I’ll be on time, Luce. Promise!”—I could’ve taken the bus like I usually do, anything but this: opening the door into a dim lecture hall, flooding the space with light, drawing every eye including Mathieson’s, who turns from his video presentation to raise a significant brow at me.
I ease the door closed behind me and hurry down to my table—where I still sit alone—and pull out my stuff. As I open my laptop to take notes, Mathieson, still lecturing, grabs a paper from his desk, steps down from the raised teaching platform, and drops it on my table.
My mock business proposal.
With a C on it.
The knot in my chest goes so tight I can’t breathe. My right hip still aches, and I lean into it. Feeling the pain like an anchor, a promise. Just last night, I stood in the mother-in-law suite above the garage, a full studio complete with a love seat, bathroom, and kitchenette, and thought, It’s perfect. Now I’m looking down at my first C.
When class ends, I pack my things and stand by the platform, waiting to catch Professor Mathieson’s attention.
“Yes, Miss Harper?” he says.
I hold out my paper. “Can I talk to you about this?”
“Of course.”
“Okay. Well. What did I do wrong? I followed the example perfectly?”
“You did.” He crosses his arms and leans back against my table. “But that’s all you did.”
“Isn’t that what you wanted?”
He takes a slow breath. “Miss Harper, do you want to study business?”
“I—”
“You’re young. High school, right?”
“Yes. A junior next year.”
His brow rises. “Wow, okay,” he says. “Why’d you pick this class? Be honest.”
I purse my lips.
“For your applications?” he guesses. “Taking a summer college course ticks a box, right?”
I nod.
He uncrosses his arms and presses the palms of his hands together. “Listen. That’s admirable. You’re ambitious and following through. But there’s nothing innovative in that.” He waves at the paper in my hand. “Nothing original or interesting or, well, outside of the box. It reads like you’re checking items off a list, because that’s what you’re doing. You took the example and filled in the blanks with new answers. That’s it. And that can get you by in a lot of life. But if adding a gold star to your college applications is the only reason you’re here, maybe this class isn’t for you.”
“It’s only one assignment.”
“It is. And it isn’t. It’s an outlook. Your approach. Filling in the blanks is the bare minimum
. If you’re not willing to push yourself to come up with something new, then you’re doing little more than warming a seat.” He holds his hands up, palms out. “Tough love, I know. But we both know the paper’s not your only issue here. A couple of members of your group say you keep missing meetings.”
I huff a breath. “That’s because two of them are roommates, and they’re always getting together at, like, midnight or meeting downtown with no notice, and I live in Lakewood and don’t have a car.”
He shrugs, like not my problem, and says, “I think you just need to ask yourself why you’re really here. Is it to learn something you’re actually interested in? Or to earn that gold star? It doesn’t make any difference to me. But I’m willing to bet that figuring that out will make a big difference to you.”
Sitting on a bench out front, I flip through my proposal, reading comments like “uninspired” and “unoriginal” and “needs fleshing out” before folding it up and shoving it into the bottom of my bag.
I have twenty minutes until the next bus, and I should be going through the math problems my SAT tutor sent over last night or brainstorming extra credit to make up for my C—my god, a C—but I open my phone and Instagram instead, pulling up Cass’s page to sink the knife a few serrations deeper.
We haven’t talked since that night three and a half weeks ago. The longest we’ve ever gone. Based on a series of sunlit photos, they went to the lake last weekend. Looking at them, I swear I can smell summer. Sunscreen and campfire smoke, and I think, Sure, that’s cool, but I’ll raise you a living, disembodied arm.
The joke echoes once, then fades out in the solitude of my head.
* * *
There’s a vase of flowers on the sideboard today. Orange vase, orange dahlias. I touch a petal. They’re real.
“You like them? They were her—”
I flinch. Turn. Isobel.
Half Life Page 5